A novel multi-step-ahead approach for cloud server aging prediction based on hybrid deep learning model

Abstract

Predicting software aging in cloud servers is essential for preventing cloud system breakdown and unexpected failures. However, the aging time series data in cloud servers often exhibits non-linearity and stochastic fluctuations, posing challenges for accurate prediction. To address this issue, this study proposes a novel multi-step ahead approach for cloud server aging prediction. Firstly, the original aging time series data is denoised using discrete wavelet transformation (DWT) and then reconstructed into multi-dimensional data by phase state reconstruction (PSR) to capture potential aging patterns. Subsequently, a deep long short-term memory network (DLSTM) is developed to predict the aging trend. Additionally, a stacked auto-encoder LSTM (SAE-LSTM) is designed to optimize the initial weight matrix of DLSTM to enhance prediction abilities. Finally, multi-step prediction experiments are conducted on our time series datasets from OpenStack cloud servers and a public dataset from Alibaba Cluster Trace Program. The comparative analysis of the proposed method with five baseline methods confirms its superiority in terms of prediction accuracy. For response time and free memory test sets, the range of root mean square error (RMSE) values are produced by the proposed method distributed in [0.1688–0.1931] and [139.05–146.05] respectively, with respect to the multi-step ahead prediction horizon from 1 up to 10. These results demonstrate that the proposed method can tackle the limitations of one-step ahead prediction, effectively extracting relevant aging features, and achieving low prediction accuracy. The study provides valuable insights into revealing future aging trends in cloud servers and offers a reference for implementing preventive maintenance and prognostics in cloud servers.