Temporal Task Scheduling with Constrained Service Delay for Profit Maximization in Hybrid Clouds

As cloud computing is becoming growingly popular, consumers' tasks around the world arrive in cloud data centers. A private cloud provider aims to achieve profit maximization by intelligently scheduling tasks while guaranteeing the service delay bound of delay-tolerant tasks. However, the aperiodicity of arrival tasks brings a challenging problem of how to dynamically schedule all arrival tasks given the fact that the capacity of a private cloud provider is limited. Previous works usually provide an admission control to intelligently refuse some of arrival tasks. Nevertheless, this will decrease the throughput of a private cloud, and cause revenue loss. This paper studies the problem of how to maximize the profit of a private cloud in hybrid clouds while guaranteeing the service delay bound of delay-tolerant tasks. We propose a profit maximization algorithm (PMA) to discover the temporal variation of prices in hybrid clouds. The temporal task scheduling provided by PMA can dynamically schedule all arrival tasks to execute in private and public clouds. The sub problem in each iteration of PMA is solved by the proposed hybrid heuristic optimization algorithm, simulated annealing particle swarm optimization (SAPSO). Besides, SAPSO is compared with existing baseline algorithms. Extensive simulation experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can greatly increase the throughput and the profit of a private cloud while guaranteeing the service delay bound.