Multilevel controller‐assisted intrinsically modified ant colony optimization heuristic‐based load‐balancing model for mega cloud infrastructures

Abstract

SummaryThe exponential rise in decentralized computing demands has made cloud computing an inevitable technical need; however, under exceedingly high load dynamism, ensuring service level agreement (SLA) has remained a challenge. Despite of the fact that heuristic‐driven VM migration or load‐balancing methods are effective towards quality of service (QoS) and reliable cloud services, the major existing solutions ignore the issues of local minima and convergence and hence undergo SLA violation (SLAV). Moreover, most of the existing methods are designed as a reactive scheduling concept that often results into delayed scheduling and hence SLAV or QoS compromise. To alleviate such issues, in this paper, a robust intrinsically modified evolutionary computing‐driven dynamic load‐balancing model (intrinsically modified ant colony system [IMACS]) is proposed for mega cloud infrastructures. To address aforesaid issues, IMACS employs stochastic prediction‐based overload detection, followed by SLA‐sensitive VM selection and IMACS for load balancing. In IMACS, the use of stochastic prediction‐based overload detection method enabled timely hotspot detection and hence improved proactive decision ability. Moreover, it applies minimum migration time‐sensitive VM selection concept that too helped in guaranteeing load balancing without undergoing downtime or SLAV. To improve VM migration, unlike classical heuristic methods, we designed IMACS with multitype population, adaptive pheromone update, adaptive pheromone diffusion, and coevolution concept, which not only helped in reducing the search space and allied computation but also enabled time‐efficient scheduling decision. The overall proposed model was realized in sync with two controllers named local controller and global controller. Here, the first controller collects the real‐time VM and VM manager (VMM) information which is used to detect overloaded host and the VM to be migrated. While the global controller is designed with IMACS to exploit the information from local controller to execute QoS‐sensitive VM migration. The proposed IMACS‐driven load‐balancing model was realized with CloudSim platform were simulating it over 800 number of independent VMs, each encompassing autonomous task, the performance was analyzed in terms of SLAV, number of migrations, SLA per active host, and energy consumption. Simulation results revealed that the proposed model exhibits 20% higher migration, while retaining almost 19% better SLA in comparison to the other state‐of‐art methods like genetic algorithm or classical ant colony system‐based load‐balancing methods. IMACS exhibited 30% higher host shutdown signifying better energy efficiency (15% lower power consumption).