CWOA: Hybrid Approach for Task Scheduling in Cloud Environment

A cloud computing system typically comprises of a huge number of interconnected servers that are organized in a datacentre. Such servers dynamically cater to the on-demand requests put forward by the clients seeking solutions to their applications through an interface. The scheduling activity concerned with scientific applications is designated under the NP hard problem category since they make use of heterogeneous resources of dynamic capabilities. Recently cloud computing researchers had developed numerous meta-heuristic approaches for providing solutions to the challenges arising in the task scheduling activities. Scheduling of tasks poses a major concern in cloud computing environment. This decreases the efficiency of the system considerably, if not handled properly. Hence, an improvised task scheduling algorithm that enhances the performance of the cloud is needed. There are two factors that affect the cloud environment: service quality and energy usage. To increase the performance in above suggested factors (memory, makespan and energy efficiency), an efficient hybridized algorithm, obtained by integrating the Cuckoo Search Algorithm (CSA) and Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA), called the CWOA had been proposed in this work. The performance of our proposed CWOA algorithm had been compared with Ant Colony Optimization, CSA and WOA and it was found to produce an improvement of 5.62%, 4.36% and 2.27% with respect to makespan, 16.36%, 19.19% and 13.13% with respect to memory utilization and 19.08%, 19.34% and 16.75% with respect to energy consumption parameters, respectively. Comprehensive results have been tabulated in the result section of this article.

Automated summary

This article introduces the importance of task scheduling in cloud computing systems and proposes the CWOA algorithm to improve system performance. By comparing it with other algorithms, the CWOA algorithm has achieved significant improvements in various metrics.