A Cuckoo-based Workflow Scheduling Algorithm to Reduce Cost and Increase Load Balance in the Cloud Environment

Abstract

Workflow scheduling is one of the important issues in implementing workflows in the cloud environment. Workflow scheduling means how to allocate workflow resources to tasks based on requirements and features of the tasks. The problem of workflow scheduling in cloud computing is a very important issue and is an NP problem. The relevant scheduling algorithms try to find optimal scheduling of tasks on the available processing resources in such a way some qualitative criteria when executing the entire workflow are satisfied. In this paper, we proposed a new scheduling algorithm for workflows in the cloud environment using Cuckoo Optimization Algorithm (COA). The aims of the proposed algorithm are reducing the processing and transmission costs as well as maintaining a desirable load balance among the processing resources. The proposed algorithm is implemented in MATLAB and its performance is compared with Cat Swarm Optimization (CSO). The results of the comparisons showed that the proposed algorithm is superior to CSO in discovering optimal solutions.

Keywords

• cloud computing
• workflow
• scheduling
• optimization
• cuckoo algorithm