Prioritized scheduling technique for healthcare tasks in cloud computing

The Internet-of-things (IoT) plays a significant role in healthcare monitoring, where the IoT Cloud integration introduces many new opportunities for real-time remote monitoring of the patient. Task scheduling is one of the major challenges in cloud environment. Solving that problem reduces delay, missed tasks, and failure rate, and increases the guarantee ratio. This paper proposes a new task scheduling and allocation technique: Prioritized Sorted Task-Based Allocation (PSTBA) for healthcare monitoring implemented in IoT cloud-based architecture. The proposed technique selects the best virtual machine to execute the health task considering multiple factors such as; the wait time of the VM and the Expected processing time (EPT) of the task as well as its criticality. An extensive simulation study is conducted using the CloudSim simulator to evaluate the performance of the proposed technique. The proposed technique is compared to the Sorted Task-Based Allocation (STBA) and FCFS techniques and it reduces the delay by 13.7% and 80.2%, the failure rate by 21% and 37.5%, and increases the guarantee ratio by 2.2% and 4.5% compared to STBA and FCFS, respectively. In analyzing the critical health tasks, the proposed PSTBA has also reduced the critical health tasks missed ratio by 15.7% and 50.9% compared to STBA and FCFS, respectively. The simulation results demonstrate that PSTBA is more effective than the STBA and FCFS techniques in terms of delay, missed critical tasks, guarantee ratio, and failure rate.