Improving the Response Time of M-Learning and Cloud Computing Environments Using a Dominant Firefly Approach

© 2013 IEEE. Mobile learning (m-learning) is a relatively new technology that helps students learn and gain knowledge using the Internet and Cloud computing technologies. Cloud computing is one of the recent advancements in the computing field that makes Internet access easy to end users. Many Cloud services rely on Cloud users for mapping Cloud software using virtualization techniques. Usually, the Cloud users' requests from various terminals will cause heavy traffic or unbalanced loads at the Cloud data centers and associated Cloud servers. Thus, a Cloud load balancer that uses an efficient load balancing technique is needed in all the cloud servers. We propose a new meta-heuristic algorithm, named the dominant firefly algorithm, which optimizes load balancing of tasks among the multiple virtual machines in the Cloud server, thereby improving the response efficiency of Cloud servers that concomitantly enhances the accuracy of m-learning systems. Our methods and findings used to solve load imbalance issues in Cloud servers, which will enhance the experiences of m-learning users. Specifically, our findings such as Cloud-Structured Query Language (SQL), querying mechanism in mobile devices will ensure users receive their m-learning content without delay; additionally, our method will demonstrate that by applying an effective load balancing technique would improve the throughput and the response time in mobile and cloud environments

A Review on Energy Consumption Optimization Techniques in IoT Based Smart Building Environments

In recent years, due to the unnecessary wastage of electrical energy in residential buildings, the requirement of energy optimization and user comfort has gained vital importance. In the literature, various techniques have been proposed addressing the energy optimization problem. The goal of each technique was to maintain a balance between user comfort and energy requirements such that the user can achieve the desired comfort level with the minimum amount of energy consumption. Researchers have addressed the issue with the help of different optimization algorithms and variations in the parameters to reduce energy consumption. To the best of our knowledge, this problem is not solved yet due to its challenging nature. The gap in the literature is due to the advancements in the technology and drawbacks of the optimization algorithms and the introduction of different new optimization algorithms. Further, many newly proposed optimization algorithms which have produced better accuracy on the benchmark instances but have not been applied yet for the optimization of energy consumption in smart homes. In this paper, we have carried out a detailed literature review of the techniques used for the optimization of energy consumption and scheduling in smart homes. The detailed discussion has been carried out on different factors contributing towards thermal comfort, visual comfort, and air quality comfort. We have also reviewed the fog and edge computing techniques used in smart homes

Developing Load Balancing for IoT - Cloud Computing Based on Advanced Firefly and Weighted Round Robin Algorithms

أدى التطور في إنترنت الأشياء (IoT) إلى ربط البلايين من الأجهزة المادية غير المتجانسة معاً لتحسين نوعية الحياة البشرية، من خلال جمع البيانات من بيئتهم. يجب تخزين هذه البيانات الهائلة التي تم تجميعها في سعة تخزين كبيرة بالإضافة إلى قدرات حاسوبية عالية، التي توفيرها الحوسبة السحابية. يتم نقل بيانات أجهزة IoT باستخدام نوعين من البروتوكولات. نقل الرسائل في قائمة انتظار النقل (MQTT) وHypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). يهدف هذا البحث لتحسين أداء النظام وزيادة الموثوقية من خلال الاستخدام الفعال للموارد. من خلال، استخدام موازنة التحميل في الحوسبة السحابية لتوزيع عبء العمل ديناميكيًا عبر العقد لتجنب زيادة التحميل على أي مورد فردي. من خلال الجمع بين نوعين من الخوارزميات: الديناميكية خوارزمية (اليراعة المتقدمة (Advanced Firefly Algorithm  والخوارزمية الثابتة (Weighted Round Robin Algorithm). وأظهرت النتيجة تحسن في استخدام الموارد وزيادة الإنتاجية وتقليل وقت وقت الاستجابة.The evolution of the Internet of things (IoT) led to connect billions of heterogeneous physical devices together to improve the quality of human life by collecting data from their environment. However, there is a need to store huge data in big storage and high computational capabilities.   Cloud computing can be used to store big data.  The data of IoT devices is transferred using two types of protocols: Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). This paper aims to make a high performance and more reliable system through efficient use of resources. Thus, load balancing in cloud computing is used to dynamically distribute the workload across nodes to avoid overloading any individual resource, by combining two types of algorithms: dynamic algorithm (adaptive firefly) and static algorithm (weighted round robin). The results show improvement in resource utilization, increased productivity, and reduced response time

PSO-CALBA: Particle Swarm Optimization Based Content-Aware Load Balancing Algorithm in Cloud Computing Environment

Cloud computing provides hosted services (i.e., servers, storage, bandwidth, and software) over the internet. The key benefits of cloud computing are scalability, efficiency, and cost reduction. The key challenge in cloud computing is the even distribution of workload across numerous heterogeneous servers. Several Cloud scheduling and load-balancing techniques have been proposed in the literature. These techniques include heuristic-based, meta-heuristics-based, and hybrid algorithms. However, most of the current cloud scheduling and load balancing schemes are not content-aware (i.e., they are not considering the content-type of user tasks). The literature studies show that the content type of tasks can significantly improve the balanced distribution of workload. In this paper, a novel hybrid approach named Particle Swarm Optimization based Content-Aware Load Balancing Algorithm (PSO-CALBA) is proposed. PSO-CALBA scheduling scheme combines machine learning and meta-heuristic algorithm that performs classification utilizing file content type. The SVM classifier is used to classify users' tasks into different content types like video, audio, image, and text. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) based meta-heuristic algorithm is used to map user's tasks on Cloud. The proposed approach has been implemented and evaluated using a renowned Cloudsim simulation kit and compared with ACOFTF and DFTF. The proposed study shows significant improvement in terms of makespan, degree of imbalance (DI)

Load Balancing in Cloud Computing Empowered with Dynamic Divisible Load Scheduling Method

The need to process and dealing with a vast amount of data is increasing with the developing technology. One of the leading promising technology is Cloud Computing, enabling one to accomplish desired goals, leading to performance enhancement. Cloud Computing comes into play with the debate on the growing requirements of data capabilities and storage capacities. Not every organization has the financial resources, infrastructure & human capital, but Cloud Computing offers an affordable infrastructure based on availability, scalability, and cost-efficiency. The Cloud can provide services to clients on-demand, making it the most adapted system for virtual storage, but still, it has some issues not adequately addressed and resolved. One of those issues is that load balancing is a primary challenge, and it is required to balance the traffic on every peer adequately rather than overloading an individual node. This paper provides an intelligent workload management algorithm, which systematically balances traffic and homogeneously allocates the load on every node & prevents overloading, and increases the response time for maximum performance enhancement

Hybrid scheduling algorithms in cloud computing: a review

Cloud computing is one of the emerging fields in computer science due to its several advancements like on-demand processing, resource sharing, and pay per use. There are several cloud computing issues like security, quality of service (QoS) management, data center energy consumption, and scaling. Scheduling is one of the several challenging problems in cloud computing, where several tasks need to be assigned to resources to optimize the quality of service parameters. Scheduling is a well-known NP-hard problem in cloud computing. This will require a suitable scheduling algorithm. Several heuristics and meta-heuristics algorithms were proposed for scheduling the user's task to the resources available in cloud computing in an optimal way. Hybrid scheduling algorithms have become popular in cloud computing. In this paper, we reviewed the hybrid algorithms, which are the combinations of two or more algorithms, used for scheduling in cloud computing. The basic idea behind the hybridization of the algorithm is to take useful features of the used algorithms. This article also classifies the hybrid algorithms and analyzes their objectives, quality of service (QoS) parameters, and future directions for hybrid scheduling algorithms

Energy-Efficient Virtual Machine Placement using Enhanced Firefly Algorithm

The consolidation of the virtual machines (VMs) helps to optimise the usage of resources and hence reduces the energy consumption in a cloud data centre. VM placement plays an important part in the consolidation of the VMs. The researchers have developed various algorithms for VM placement considering the optimised energy consumption. However, these algorithms lack the use of exploitation mechanism efficiently. This paper addresses VM placement issues by proposing two meta-heuristic algorithms namely, the enhanced modified firefly algorithm (MFF) and the hierarchical cluster based modified firefly algorithm (HCMFF), presenting the comparative analysis relating to energy optimisation. The comparisons are made against the existing honeybee (HB) algorithm, honeybee cluster based technique (HCT) and the energy consumption results of all the participating algorithms confirm that the proposed HCMFF is more efficient than the other algorithms. The simulation study shows that HCMFF consumes 12% less energy than honeybee algorithm, 6% less than HCT algorithm and 2% less than original firefly. The usage of the appropriate algorithm can help in efficient usage of energy in cloud computing

Scheduling Problems

Scheduling is defined as the process of assigning operations to resources over time to optimize a criterion. Problems with scheduling comprise both a set of resources and a set of a consumers. As such, managing scheduling problems involves managing the use of resources by several consumers. This book presents some new applications and trends related to task and data scheduling. In particular, chapters focus on data science, big data, high-performance computing, and Cloud computing environments. In addition, this book presents novel algorithms and literature reviews that will guide current and new researchers who work with load balancing, scheduling, and allocation problems

Enhanced Cuckoo Search Algorithm for Virtual Machine Placement in Cloud Data Centers

In order to enhance resource utilisation and power efficiency in cloud data centres it is important to perform Virtual Machine (VM) placement in an optimal manner. VM placement uses the method of mapping virtual machines to physical machines (PM). Cloud computing researchers have recently introduced various meta-heuristic algorithms for VM placement considering the optimised energy consumption. However, these algorithms do not meet the optimal energy consumption requirements. This paper proposes an Enhanced Cuckoo Search (ECS) algorithm to address the issues with VM placement focusing on the energy consumption. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated using three different workloads in CloudSim tool. The evaluation process includes comparison of the proposed algorithm against the existing Genetic Algorithm (GA), Optimised Firefly Search (OFS) algorithm, and Ant Colony (AC) algorithm. The comparision results illustrate that the proposed ECS algorithm consumes less energy than the participant algorithms while maintaining a steady performance for SLA and VM migration. The ECS algorithm consumes around 25% less energy than GA, 27% less than OFS, and 26% less than AC