Performance analysis of ACO-based improved virtual machine allocation in cloud for IoT-enabled healthcare

The Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled healthcare environment irregularly requires the resources from the Cloud to handle massive amounts of data, which impacts the response times of the Cloud. A typical healthcare application scenario could be to monitor the heart-patients who require the highest response times, immediate attention of all the stakeholders, and very quick decisions. This paper replaces the default First-Come-First-Serve (FCFS) Virtual Machine (VM) allocation scheme of the Cloud computing in CloudSim with the implementation of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) by the efficient tuning of parameters. An IoT-enabled healthcare environment is designed, which irregularly requires the resources from the Cloud to handle massive amounts of data to assess the impact of the response times of the Cloud. Several experiments have been carried out to assess the optimal VM allocation using ACO by varying different parameters like the variation of the number of ants, the strength of pheromone, the number of VMs, the number of hosts, the strength of computing power of processing elements, the number of users, and the size of the workloads. Experimental results indicate that the ACO optimally utilizes the resources in a Cloud when compared to the default FCFS strategy. The results indicate that on an average, the ACO gives 25% to 30% improved response times than FCFS in the given healthcare and Cloud scenarios.