An energy-saving task scheduling strategy based on vacation queuing theory in cloud computing

High energy consumption is one of the key issues of cloud computing systems. Incoming jobs in cloud computing environments have the nature of randomness, and compute nodes have to be powered on all the time to await incoming tasks. This results in a great waste of energy. An energy-saving task scheduling algorithm based on the vacation queuing model for cloud computing systems is proposed in this paper. First, we use the vacation queuing model with exhaustive service to model the task schedule of a heterogeneous cloud computing system. Next, based on the busy period and busy cycle under steady state, we analyze the expectations of task sojourn time and energy consumption of compute nodes in the heterogeneous cloud computing system. Subsequently, we propose a task scheduling algorithm based on similar tasks to reduce the energy consumption. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can reduce the energy consumption of the cloud computing system effectively while meeting the task performance.