Agent coalitions for load balancing in cloud data centers

Abstract

The workload of Cloud data centers is constantly fluctuating causing imbalances across physical hosts that may lead to violations of service-level agreements. To mitigate workload imbalances, this work proposes a concurrent agent-based problem-solving technique supported by cooperative game theory capable of balancing workloads by means of live migration of virtual machines (VMs). Nearby agents managing physical hosts are partitioned into coalitions in which agents play coalitional games to progressively balance separate sections of a data center while considering the coalition's benefit of migrating a VM as well as its associated network overhead. Simulation results show that, in general, the proposed coalition-based load balancing mechanism outperformed a load balancing mechanism based on a hill-climbing algorithm used by a top data center vendor when considering altogether (i) the standard deviation of resource usage, (ii) the number of migrations, and (iii) the number of switch hops per migration.