Energy and Makespan Aware Scheduling of Deadline Sensitive Tasks in the Cloud Environment

Abstract

Cloud computing enables the execution of various applications submitted by the users in the virtualized Cloud environment. However, the Cloud infrastructure consumes a significant amount of electrical energy to provide services to its users that have a detrimental effect on the environment. Many of these applications (tasks), like those belonging to the healthcare system, scientific research, the Internet of Things (IoT), and others, are deadline-sensitive. Hence efficient scheduling of tasks is essential to prevent deadline violation, decrease makespan, and at the same time reduce energy consumption. To address this issue, we have considered the bi-objective optimization problem of minimization of energy and makespan and have proposed two scheduling approaches for independent, deadline-sensitive tasks in a heterogeneous Cloud environment. Our first approach is a greedy heuristic based on the Linear Weighted Sum technique. The second one is based on Ant Colony Optimization and uses a combination of heuristic search and positive feedback of information to improve the solution. Both approaches use a three-tier model where tasks are scheduled by taking into account the properties of three entities- tasks, VMs, and hosts. Moreover, we have proposed a suitable strategy for scaling of Cloud resources to improve energy-efficiency and task schedulability. Extensive simulations using Google Cloud trace-logs and comparison with some state-of-art approaches validate the effectiveness of our proposed scheduling techniques in achieving a proper trade-off between the energy consumption of the virtualized Cloud infrastructure and the average makespan of the tasks.