Deep Reinforcement Learning for Workload Prediction in Federated Cloud Environments

Sensors (Basel). 2023 Aug 3;23(15):6911. doi: 10.3390/s23156911.

Abstract

The Federated Cloud Computing (FCC) paradigm provides scalability advantages to Cloud Service Providers (CSP) in preserving their Service Level Agreement (SLA) as opposed to single Data Centers (DC). However, existing research has primarily focused on Virtual Machine (VM) placement, with less emphasis on energy efficiency and SLA adherence. In this paper, we propose a novel solution, Federated Cloud Workload Prediction with Deep Q-Learning (FEDQWP). Our solution addresses the complex VM placement problem, energy efficiency, and SLA preservation, making it comprehensive and beneficial for CSPs. By leveraging the capabilities of deep learning, our FEDQWP model extracts underlying patterns and optimizes resource allocation. Real-world workloads are extensively evaluated to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach compared to existing solutions. The results show that our DQL model outperforms other algorithms in terms of CPU utilization, migration time, finished tasks, energy consumption, and SLA violations. Specifically, our QLearning model achieves efficient CPU utilization with a median value of 29.02, completes migrations in an average of 0.31 units, finishes an average of 699 tasks, consumes the least energy with an average of 1.85 kWh, and exhibits the lowest number of SLA violations with an average of 0.03 violations proportionally. These quantitative results highlight the superiority of our proposed method in optimizing performance in FCC environments.

Keywords: Deep Q learning; Deep Reinforcement Learning; Federated Cloud Computing; Machine Learning; Virtual Machine placement; energy efficiency; workload prediction.