Network-aware embedding of virtual machine clusters onto federated cloud infrastructure

•A virtual machine cluster embedding algorithm for federated cloud is suggested.•Suggested algorithm optimizes network delay and bandwidth allocation.•A framework for modeling of resource allocation in federated cloud is presented.

Federated clouds are continuously developing as the demands of cloud users get more complicated. Contemporary cloud management technologies like Open-Stack (Sefraoui et al., 2012) and OpenNebula (Milojičić et al., 2011) allow users to define network topologies among virtual machines that are requested. Therefore, federated clouds currently face the challenge of network topology mapping in addition to conventional resource allocation problems. In this paper, topology based mapping of virtual machine clusters onto the federated cloud infrastructures is studied. A novel algorithm is presented to perform the mapping operation that work towards minimizing network latency and optimizing bandwidth utilization. To realize and evaluate the algorithm, a widely used cloud simulation environment, CloudSim (Calheiros et al., 2011), is extended to support several additional capabilities in network and cost modeling. Evaluation is performed by comparing the proposed algorithm to a number of conventional heuristics such as least latency first and round-robin. Results under different request characteristics indicate that the proposed algorithm performs significantly better than the compared conventional approaches regarding various QoS parameters such as inter-cloud latency and throughput.