Cloud computing resource scheduling and a survey of its evolutionary approaches

A disruptive technology fundamentally transforming the way that computing services are delivered, cloud computing offers information and communication technology users a new dimension of convenience of resources, as services via the Internet. Because cloud provides a finite pool of virtualized on-demand resources, optimally scheduling them has become an essential and rewarding topic, where a trend of using Evolutionary Computation (EC) algorithms is emerging rapidly. Through analyzing the cloud computing architecture, this survey first presents taxonomy at two levels of scheduling cloud resources. It then paints a landscape of the scheduling problem and solutions. According to the taxonomy, a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art approaches is presented systematically. Looking forward, challenges and potential future research directions are investigated and invited, including real-time scheduling, adaptive dynamic scheduling, large-scale scheduling, multiobjective scheduling, and distributed and parallel scheduling. At the dawn of Industry 4.0, cloud computing scheduling for cyber-physical integration with the presence of big data is also discussed. Research in this area is only in its infancy, but with the rapid fusion of information and data technology, more exciting and agenda-setting topics are likely to emerge on the horizon

A Genetic Algorithm for Power-Aware Virtual Machine Allocation in Private Cloud

Energy efficiency has become an important measurement of scheduling algorithm for private cloud. The challenge is trade-off between minimizing of energy consumption and satisfying Quality of Service (QoS) (e.g. performance or resource availability on time for reservation request). We consider resource needs in context of a private cloud system to provide resources for applications in teaching and researching. In which users request computing resources for laboratory classes at start times and non-interrupted duration in some hours in prior. Many previous works are based on migrating techniques to move online virtual machines (VMs) from low utilization hosts and turn these hosts off to reduce energy consumption. However, the techniques for migration of VMs could not use in our case. In this paper, a genetic algorithm for power-aware in scheduling of resource allocation (GAPA) has been proposed to solve the static virtual machine allocation problem (SVMAP). Due to limited resources (i.e. memory) for executing simulation, we created a workload that contains a sample of one-day timetable of lab hours in our university. We evaluate the GAPA and a baseline scheduling algorithm (BFD), which sorts list of virtual machines in start time (i.e. earliest start time first) and using best-fit decreasing (i.e. least increased power consumption) algorithm, for solving the same SVMAP. As a result, the GAPA algorithm obtains total energy consumption is lower than the baseline algorithm on simulated experimentation.Comment: 10 page

Coverage Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks: Review and Future Directions

The coverage problem in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be generally defined as a measure of how effectively a network field is monitored by its sensor nodes. This problem has attracted a lot of interest over the years and as a result, many coverage protocols were proposed. In this survey, we first propose a taxonomy for classifying coverage protocols in WSNs. Then, we classify the coverage protocols into three categories (i.e. coverage aware deployment protocols, sleep scheduling protocols for flat networks, and cluster-based sleep scheduling protocols) based on the network stage where the coverage is optimized. For each category, relevant protocols are thoroughly reviewed and classified based on the adopted coverage techniques. Finally, we discuss open issues (and recommend future directions to resolve them) associated with the design of realistic coverage protocols. Issues such as realistic sensing models, realistic energy consumption models, realistic connectivity models and sensor localization are covered