Energy Aware Load Balancing in Cloudlet Federation

Abstract

With the rapid increase of compute intensive tasks and workload, the need of the hour is to manage the total workload due to resource constraints and increased cost. For complex computations where multiple computer systems are required to execute a single task such as in federated cloudlet environment, load balancing is the main challenge. Load balancing means to divide the total workload between all the member nodes to get the maximum benefits from the federated environment. A cloudlet is a resourceful computer that is coupled to the Internet and is accessible to the mobile devices in the vicinity. Cloudlet Federation is the concept of a cooperative framework to share resources and load balancing among various member cloudlets. Different tasks consume different amount of energy for their execution that results in a large amount of heat dissipation. Due to heat, the performance of the systems is decreased. The more heat, the more performance degradation, so it becomes very vital to keep the energy consumption as minimum as possible. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel scheduling strategy that will distribute the total load between all the member nodes in a federated cloudlet environment for load balancing. The proposed methodology not only considers the energy level of the system on which the task has to be executed but also considers the energy required by the tasks in queue. The proposed methodology is tested in a Cloudlet Federation environment and the results show an improved load balancing in terms of energy consumption.