A non-cooperative game model for reliability-based task scheduling in cloud computing

Cloud computing is a newly emerging distributed system. Task scheduling is the core research of cloud computing which studies how to allocate the tasks among the physical nodes, so that the tasks can get a balanced allocation or each task's execution cost decreases to the minimum, or the overall system performance is optimal. Unlike task scheduling based on time or cost before, aiming at the special reliability requirements in cloud computing, we propose a non-cooperative game model for reliability-based task scheduling approach. This model takes the steady-state availability that computing nodes provide as the target, takes the task slicing strategy of the schedulers as the game strategy, then finds the Nash equilibrium solution. We also design a task scheduling algorithm based on this model. It can be seen from the experiments that our task scheduling algorithm is better than the so-called balanced scheduling algorithm.