Task Scheduling in Cloud Computing: A Priority-Based Heuristic Approach

Abstract

In this paper, a task scheduling problem for a cloud computing environment is formulated by using the M/M/n queuing model. A priority assignment algorithm is designed to employ a new data structure named the waiting time matrix to assign priority to individual tasks upon arrival. In addition to this, the waiting queue implements a unique concept based on the principle of the Fibonacci heap for extracting the task with the highest priority. This work introduces a parallel algorithm for task scheduling in which the priority assignment to task and building of heap is executed in parallel with respect to the non-preemptive and preemptive nature of tasks. The proposed work is illustrated in a step-by-step manner with an appropriate number of tasks. The performance of the proposed model is compared in terms of overall waiting time and CPU time against some existing techniques like BATS, IDEA, and BATS+BAR to determine the efficacy of our proposed algorithms. Additionally, three distinct scenarios have been considered to demonstrate the competency of the task scheduling method in handling tasks with different priorities. Furthermore, the task scheduling algorithm is also applied in a dynamic cloud computing environment.

Keywords

• Fibonacci heap
• cloud computing
• preemptive scheduling
• priority queue
• task scheduling
• virtual machine