Resource Allocation and Scheduling in Cloud Computing: Policy and Algorithm

Cloud computing is a new distributed commercial computing model that aims at providing computational resources or services to users over a network in a low-cost manner. Resource allocation and scheduling (RAS) is the key focus of cloud computing, and its policy and algorithm have a direct effect on cloud performance and cost. This paper presents five major topics in cloud computing, namely locality-aware task scheduling; reliability-aware scheduling; energy-aware RAS; Software as a Service (SaaS) layer RAS; and workflow scheduling. These five topics are then classified into three parts: performance-based RAS; cost-based RAS; and performance- and cost-based RAS. A number of existing RAS policies and algorithms are discussed in detail accordingly with regard to their given parameters. In addition, a comparative analysis of five identified problems with their representative algorithms is performed. Finally, some future research directions of cloud RAS are pointed out.