Modelling and simulation of security-aware task scheduling in cloud computing based on Blockchain technology

Abstract

Although a lot of work has been done in the domain, tasks scheduling and resource allocation in cloud computing remain the challenging problems for both industry and academia. Security in scheduling in highly distributed computing environments is one of the most important criteria in the era of personalization of the cloud services. Blockchain became recently a promising technology for integration with the cloud clusters and improvement of the security of cloud transactions and access to data and application codes. In this paper, we developed a new model of the cloud scheduler based on the blockchain technology. Differently to the other similar models, we tried to offload the implementation of the blockchain modules. We developed a novel ’proof–of–schedule’ consensus algorithm (instead of ’proof–of–work’) and used the Stackelberg games for the improvement of the approval of the generated schedules. The developed model has been experimentally simulated and validated by using the new original cloud simulator. The proposed Blockchain Scheduler was also compared with other selected cloud schedulers. The experiments shows that the applied approach improved significantly the efficiency of prepared schedules, in most cases, simulator returns a schedule with better makespan than existing individual scheduling modules.