Abstract
Inefficient healthcare is a major concern among many African nations and can be mitigated by building world-class infrastructure connecting different medical facilities for collaboration and resource sharing. Such infrastructure should support collection and exchange of medical data for the purpose of accessing expertise not available locally. It should be equipped with modern technologies of the fourth industrial revolution, providing decision support to doctors thereby enabling African nations leapfrog from poorly equipped to medically prepared. Sadly, world-class healthcare infrastructure are a missing piece in the African public health ecosystem. Medical facilities are either non-existent or prohibitively expensive when they exist. Federated cloud computing can provide a solution to this challenge. Being a model that allows collaboration between multiple Cloud service providers through resources pooling; it allows for the execution of tasks on computing resources flexibly and cost efficiently. This paper aims to connect unconnected medical facilities in Africa by proposing a Cloud federation for healthcare using cooperative and competitive collaboration models. Simulations were carried out to test the efficacy of these models using five different workload allocation schemes: First-Fit-Descending (FFD), Best-Fit-Descending (BFD), Binary-Search-Best-Fit (BSBF); Genetic Algorithm meta-heuristic and Stable Roommate Allocation economic model for both light and heavy workloads. Results of simulations revealed that the cooperative model resulted in lower delays but higher resource utilisation; while the competitive provided faster service delivery and better quality of service. BSBF and BFD resulted in the best resources utilisation and energy conservation. Finally, deployment considerations and potential business models for federated Cloud for African healthcare were presented.
Highlights
Cloud computing is a key technology which plays a vital role when interfacing the physical and virtual worlds in most fields of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR)
These PMs were of two categories with specifications and power consumption models based on bench-marked data from real servers [34] and given as follows: category one had 2 CPU cores clocked at 1,860MHz and 4GB of memory, while the second category had similar configuration but with CPUs clocked at 2,600MHz
User workloads were executed on any of four types of virtual machine (VM), viz.: single core @ 2500MHz, single core @ 2000MHz, single core @ 1000MHz and single core @ 500MHz. Data used for this experiment were extracted from anonymized workload traces of VMs submitted to a Google cluster and PlanetLab
Summary
Cloud computing is a key technology which plays a vital role when interfacing the physical and virtual worlds in most fields of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR). There are numerous definitions of Cloud computing in literature, that of the NIST is arguably the most accepted. According to the NIST, Cloud computing is a model that enables pools of measurable computing resources be made available to users conveniently and ubiquitously [1]. One of the key characteristic of Cloud computing is elastic pool of resources, this implies a near infinitive resource scale. No Cloud Service Provider (CSP) is able to provide a limitless amount of resources to users. Cloud resources need to be available at
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