Load Balancing of Tasks in Cloud Computing Environment Based on Bee Colony Algorithm

Cloud computing is an emerging computing paradigm in which shared resources are provided according to the customer request at specific time. Load balancing is the process of distributing workload among various nodes of the computing system. The load can be CPU load, memory capacity, or network load. An efficient load balancing avoids a situation where some of the nodes are heavily loaded while other nodes are idle or doing very little work. When Virtual Machine (VM) is overloaded with multiple tasks, these tasks are removed and migrated to the under loaded VMs of the same or different datacenter. This paper proposes a bee colony based algorithm for efficient load balancing, which is based on the foraging behavior of honey bees to balance load across VMs. In the proposed method, tasks removed from over loaded VMs are treated as honey bees and under loaded VMs are the food sources. The proposed method also considers the priorities of tasks in the waiting queues of VMs and tries to achieve minimum response time and reduced number of task migrations. The experimental result shows that there is significant improvement in the Quality of Service (QoS).