An Energy-aware Real-time Task Scheduling Approach in a Cloud Computing Environment

Interest in cloud computing has grown considerably over recent years, primarily due to scalable virtualized resources. So, cloud computing has contributed to the advancement of real-time applications such as signal processing, environment surveillance and weather forecast where time and energy considerations to perform the tasks are critical. In real-time applications, missing the deadlines for the tasks will cause catastrophic consequences; thus, real-time task scheduling in cloud computing environment is an important and essential issue. Furthermore, energy-saving in cloud data center, regarding the benefits such as reduction of system operating costs and environmental protection is an important concern that is considered during recent years and is reducible with appropriate task scheduling. In this paper, we present an energy-aware task scheduling approach, namely EaRTs for real-time applications. We employ the virtualization and consolidation technique subject to minimizing the energy consumptions, improve resource utilization and meeting the deadlines of tasks. In the consolidation technique, scale up and scale down of virtualized resources could improve the performance of task execution. The proposed approach comprises four algorithms, namely Energy-aware Task Scheduling in Cloud Computing(ETC), Vertical VM Scale Up(V۲S), Horizontal VM Scale up(HVS) and Physical Machine Scale Down(PSD). We present the formal model of the proposed approach using Timed Automata to prove precisely the schedulability feature and correctness of EaRTs. We show that our proposed approach is more efficient in terms of deadline hit ratio, resource utilization and energy consumption compared to other energy-aware real-time tasks scheduling algorithms.

Keywords:

Cloud Computing , Scale Up , Scale Down , Scheduling , Timed Automata