An Ant Colony Based Load Balancing Strategy in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing thrives a new supplement of consumption and delivery model for internet based services and protocol. It provides large scale computing infrastructure defined on usage and also provides infrastructure services in a very flexible manner which may scales up and down according to user demand. To meet the QoS and satisfy the end users demands for resources in time is one of the main goals for cloud service provider. For this reason selecting a proper node that can complete end users task with QoS is really challenging job. Thus in Cloud distributing dynamic workload across multiple nodes in a distributed environment evenly, is called load balancing. Load balancing can be an optimization problem and should be adapting its strategy to the changing needs. This paper proposes a novel ant colony based algorithm to balance the load by searching under loaded node. Proposed load balancing strategy has been simulated using the CloudAnalyst. Experimental result for a typical sample application outperformed the traditional approaches like First Come First Serve (FCFS), local search algorithm like Stochastic Hill Climbing (SHC),another soft computing approach Genetic Algorithm (GA) and some existing Ant Colony Based strategy.