Load balancing mechanisms and techniques in the cloud environments: Systematic literature review and future trends

• Existing challenges associated with load balancing utilized in cloud computing.
• Comprehensive review of load balancing techniques and their implementation in cloud computing.
• Exploring the role of load balancing in the future cloud computing challenges.
• Outlining the future improvements of load balancing techniques in cloud computing.

With cloud computing, new services in information technology (IT) emerge from the convergence of business and technology perspectives which furnish users access to IT resources anytime and anywhere using pay-per-use fashion. Therefore, it should supply eminent functioning gain to the user and simultaneously ought to be advantageous for the cloud service provider. To accomplish this goal, many challenges have to be faced, where load balancing is one of them. The optimal selection of a resource for a particular job does not mean that the selected resource persists optimized for the whole execution of the job. The resource overloading/under-loading must be avoided which could be gained by appropriate load balancing mechanisms. However, to the best of our knowledge, despite the importance of load balancing techniques and mechanisms, there is not any comprehensive and systematic review about studying and analyzing its important techniques. Hence, this paper presents a systematic literature review of the existing load balancing techniques proposed so far. Detailed classifications have also been included based on different parameters which are relying upon the analysis of the existing techniques. Also, the advantages and disadvantages associated with several load balancing algorithms have been discussed and the important challenges of these algorithms are addressed so that more efficient load balancing techniques can be developed in future.