Ant Colony Optimization-based Light Weight Container (ACO-LWC) Algorithm for Efficient Load Balancing

Abstract

Container technology is the latest lightweight virtualization technology which is an alternate solution for virtual machines. Docker is the most popular container technology for creating and managing Linux containers. Containers appear to be the most suitable medium for use in dynamic development, packaging, shipping and many other information technology environments. The portability of the software through the movement of containers is appreciated by businesses and IT professionals. In the docker container, one or more processes may run simultaneously. The main objective of this work is to propose a new algorithm called Ant Colony Optimization-based Light Weight Container (ACO-LWC) load balancing scheduling algorithm for scheduling various process requests. This algorithm is designed such that it shows best performance in terms of load balancing. The proposed algorithm is validated by comparison with two existing load balancing scheduling algorithms namely, least connection algorithm and round robin algorithm. The proposed algorithm is validated using metrics like response time (ms), mean square error (MSE), node load, largest Transactions Per Second (TPS) of cluster (fetches/sec), average response time for each request (ms) and run time (s). Quantitative analysis show that the proposed ACO-LWC scheme achieves best performance in terms of all the metrics compared to the existing algorithms. In particular, the response time for least connection, round robin and the proposed ACO-LWC algorithm are 58, 60 and 48 ms respectively when 95% requests are finished. Similarly, the error for scheduling 120 requests using least connection, round robin and the proposed ACO-LWC algorithm are 0.15, 0.11 and 0.06 respectively.