An Improved Ant Colony Algorithm for Solving a Virtual Machine Placement Problem in a Cloud Computing Environment

Abstract

The world is currently witnessing many successive changes in several fields, especially in the field of healthcare which forced countries to impose health policies to provide good services, which drew health sector strategies focusing on the digital transformation aspect. E-government healthcare applications are used by dozens of millions of users. This high usage of applications generates a huge network traffic and needs reliable cloud computing platforms and efficient virtual machine placement models. In this context, we proposed an improved Ant Colony algorithm to solve a virtual machine placement problem in a cloud computing environment in order to minimize the total network traffic and the maximum link utilization. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed algorithm.

Keywords

• Ant colony optimization
• cloud computing
• placement
• scheduling
• virtualization