Minimizing latency in geo-distributed clouds

Geo-distributed data-centers in cloud computing are becoming increasingly popular due to their lower end-user perceived latency and increased reliability in distributed applications. The important challenge of resource allocation in cloud management is more pronounced in geo-distributed data-centers compared to traditional data-centers. A geo-distributed cloud manager faces applications whose virtual machines (VMs) are far apart and need to interact with end users, access distributed data and communicate with each other. In such applications, the service level agreement is not met if the communication latency is not bounded. In this paper, we focus on the problem of finding data-centers for hosting VMs while the requested VMs are located in different geo-distributed data-centers and are sensitive to the communication latency. We propose an algorithm to minimize communication latency by taking into account the cloud network topology to be either a tree or that of the Internet. Moreover, our algorithm can utilize user’s locations to find better candidate solutions. In the case of tree topology, we prove that our algorithm finds a solution whose latency is minimum. In addition, we show that our algorithm performs well in the Internet topology, with simulation results indicating that it can reduce the communication latency up to $$92~\%$$92% compared to existing algorithms.