Geographical Load Balancing for Online Service Applications in Distributed Datacenters

Abstract

This work focuses on the load balancing problem for online service applications (which are response time-sensitive) considering a distributed cloud system comprised of geographically dispersed, heterogeneous datacenters. An offline solution based on force-directed scheduling is presented, which can determine the application placement for long periods of time. The solution is then extended to do online application placement and migration for geographically distributed datacenters based on predictions about the application lifetimes, workload intensities, dynamic energy prices, and renewable energy generation capacities at different datacenters in the cloud system. The simulation results demonstrate 27% to 40% improvement using the proposed algorithms with respect to the method that does not consider the geographical load balancing.