Systematic review on existing load balancing techniques in cloud computing

Abstract

Cloud computing requires more reliable, efficient and scalable load balancing algorithm to survive. As one of the main challenges in cloud computing, load balancing facilitate dynamic workload across multiple nodes ensuring that no single node get overloaded. With proper load balancing, resource consumption is maintained at minimum level, enabling scalability, avoiding bottleneck and overprovisioning etc. In this paper, systematic review on existing load balancing techniques currently prevalent in cloud computing was carried out. Load balancing metrics; Response time, Performance, Resource Utilization, Throughput, Cost Overhead, Scalability, Fault Tolerant and Migration Time were used to evaluate the existing techniques. Findings show that the existing techniques mainly focus on reducing response time, completion time, cost and improving throughput. Neither of the techniques was able to unveil efficient load balancing of task scheduling for single and federated cloud environment. However, research such as load balancing of energy consumption, server consolidation, Virtual Machine Migration, are not taken into consideration by the existing techniques. Future research is to unveil efficient multi-objective load balancing of tasks scheduling algorithm with quality of service improvements for homogeneous and federated heterogeneous cloud environment.