Fourth industrial revolution for development: The relevance of cloud federation in healthcare support

Abstract

Inefficient healthcare is a major concern among many African nations. It can be mitigated by building world-class infrastructure connecting different medical facilities for collaboration and resource sharing. Such infrastructure should support the exchange of medical data, enabling access to expertise not available locally. It should be equipped with technologies of the fourth industrial revolution, providing support to doctors thereby enabling African nations leapfrog from poorly equipped to medically prepared. Sadly, world-class healthcare facilities are a missing piece in African public health ecosystems. Medical facilities are either non-existent or prohibitively expensive. Being a collaborative model between Cloud providers, federated Clouds allow the execution of tasks on computing resources flexibly and cost efficiently. This paper aims to interconnect medical facilities across Africa by proposing a Cloud federation for healthcare using co-operative and competitive collaboration models. Simulations were carried out to test the efficiency of these models using two new allocation schemes: Genetic Algorithm-based VM Allocation (GAVA) and Stable Roommate Allocation (SRA). These schemes were bench-marked against First-Fit-Descending (FFD), Best-Fit-Descending (BFD), Binary-Search-Best-Fit (BSBF) allocation schemes; for both light and heavy workloads. Obtained results revealed that the co-operative model resulted in lower delays but higher resource utilization; while the competitive provided faster service delivery and better quality of service. Deployment considerations and potential business models for the African Cloud federation were also presented.