Bidirectional Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm for Cloud Load Balancing

Cloud computing supplies convenient, on-demand network access to shared computing resources. Although cloud computing has many advantages, some core issues, such as load balancing, need to be resolved. Cloud load balancing provides a mechanism to allocate the appropriate workload for each virtual machine in a cloud computing environment. One of the main characteristics of the cloud computing environment is rapid change; therefore, a good load-balancing method should adapt quickly to environment changes to achieve high performance. This paper proposes a load-balancing method based on the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm and describes a simulation using the CloudSim toolkit package. Experimental results show that the proposed method is an effective ACO method for cloud balancing.