BGM-BLA: A New Algorithm for Dynamic Migration of Virtual Machines in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is getting more prevalent and finding a way to reduce the cost of cloud computing platform through the migration of virtual machines (VM) is a concerned issue. In this paper, the problem of dynamic migration of VMs (DM-VM) in the cloud computing platform (or simply the cloud) is investigated. A triple-objective optimization model for DM-VM is established, which takes energy consumption, communication between VMs, and migration cost into account under the situation that the platform works normally. The DM-VM problem is divided into two parts: (i) forming VMs into groups, and (ii) determining the best way to place the groups into certain physical nodes. A binary graph matching-based bucket-code learning algorithm (BGM-BLA) is designed for solving the DM-VM problem. In BGM-BLA, bucket-coding and learning is employed for finding the optimal solutions, and binary graph matching is used for evaluating the candidate solutions. The computational results demonstrate that the proposed BGM-BLA algorithm performs relatively well in terms of the Pareto sets obtained and computational time in comparison with two optimization algorithms, i.e., Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II) and binary graph matching-based common-coding algorithm.