A novel cloud workflow scheduling algorithm based on stable matching game theory

Workflow scheduling is one of the most popular and challenging problems in cloud computing. However, among the studies on cloud workflow scheduling, very few consider the fairness among workflow tasks which could significantly delay the workflows and hence deteriorates user satisfaction. In this paper, we propose a workflow scheduling algorithm based on stable matching game theory to minimize workflow makespan and ensure the fairness among the tasks. The local optimization methods based on critical path and task duplication are developed to improve the performance of the algorithm. In addition, a novel evaluation metric is proposed to measure the fairness among workflow tasks. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to compare the performance of the proposed algorithm with other four representative algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms the other compared algorithms in terms of all three performance metrics under different workflow applications.