Analysis of Load Balancing Algorithms Used in the Cloud Computing Environment: Advantages and Limitations

Abstract

Cloud computing as an advanced technology in the IT infrastructure presents nowadays a big concern of researches. It’s no longer a matter of on-demand successful delivery of computing resources. Throughput, performance, server response time, and cost had become the metrics that enable the quality-of-service agreement. Technically, cloud service provider guarantees to deliver computing resources (storage, servers and applications) through back-end data center. It consists of several hosts distributed geographically to answer the client requests. To ensure the service level agreement between clients and providers, cloud infrastructure software need to schedule and optimally manage the workload of several demands. Here, Load balancing technology enters as a major key with a set of algorithms to handle the most effectively and fairly the allocation and scheduling of computational resources, to serve the large amount of calling jobs. This review presents a comparative and comprehensive study that covers the principal concepts of cloud computing, and the well-known algorithms used for load balancing which are classified into static and dynamic sets. The objectives of this survey are to (1) mention, explain, compare and analyze some developed methods for load balancing by systematically reviewing papers from the years 2018 to 2021, (2) analyze the level of maturity of the solutions proposed in the literature and (3) present an insight into the actual solutions which may help with future improvements.