Cloud based intelligent system for delivering health care as a service

The promising potential of cloud computing and its convergence with technologies such as mobile computing, wireless networks, sensor technologies allows for creation and delivery of newer type of cloud services. In this paper, we advocate the use of cloud computing for the creation and management of cloud based health care services. As a representative case study, we design a Cloud Based Intelligent Health Care Service (CBIHCS) that performs real time monitoring of user health data for diagnosis of chronic illness such as diabetes. Advance body sensor components are utilized to gather user specific health data and store in cloud based storage repositories for subsequent analysis and classification. In addition, infrastructure level mechanisms are proposed to provide dynamic resource elasticity for CBIHCS. Experimental results demonstrate that classification accuracy of 92.59% is achieved with our prototype system and the predicted patterns of CPU usage offer better opportunities for adaptive resource elasticity.     

Artificial bee colony based energy‐aware resource utilization technique for cloud computing

Cloud computing is a form of distributed computing, which promises to deliver reliable services through next‐generation data centers that are built on virtualized compute and storage technologies. It is becoming truly ubiquitous and with cloud infrastructures becoming essential components for providing Internet services, there is an increase in energy‐hungry data centers deployed by cloud providers. As cloud providers often rely on large data centers to offer the resources required by the users, the energy consumed by cloud infrastructures has become a key environmental and economical concern. Much energy is wasted in these data centers because of under‐utilized resources hence contributing to global warming. To conserve energy, these under‐utilized resources need to be efficiently utilized and to achieve this, jobs need to be allocated to the cloud resources in such a way so that the resources are used efficiently and there is a gain in performance and energy efficiency. In this paper, a model for energy‐aware resource utilization technique has been proposed to efficiently manage cloud resources and enhance their utilization. It further helps in reducing the energy consumption of clouds by using server consolidation through virtualization without degrading the performance of users’ applications. An artificial bee colony based energy‐aware resource utilization technique corresponding to the model has been designed to allocate jobs to the resources in a cloud environment. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been evaluated with the existing algorithms through the CloudSim toolkit. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed technique outperforms the existing techniques by minimizing energy consumption and execution time of applications submitted to the cloud. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Data deduplication techniques for efficient cloud storage management: a systematic review

The exponential growth of digital data in cloud storage systems is a critical issue presently as a large amount of duplicate data in the storage systems exerts an extra load on it. Deduplication is an efficient technique that has gained attention in large-scale storage systems. Deduplication eliminates redundant data, improves storage utilization and reduces storage cost. This paper presents a broad methodical literature review of existing data deduplication techniques along with various existing taxonomies of deduplication techniques that have been based on cloud data storage. Furthermore, the paper investigates deduplication techniques based on text and multimedia data along with their corresponding taxonomies as these techniques have different challenges for duplicate data detection. This research work is useful to identify deduplication techniques based on text, image and video data. It also discusses existing challenges and significant research directions in deduplication for future researchers, and article concludes with a summary of valuable suggestions for future enhancements in deduplication.     

Framework for cloud-based software test data generation service

This paper presents the framework of cloud-based software test data generation service (CSTS) that caters to cost-effective test data generation service in a cloud environment. In contrast to existing conventional or cloud-based testing frameworks, CSTS has a number of unique benefits. First, CSTS is designed to facilitate test data generation in minimum time and cost. Second, unlike existing frameworks which mandates clients to opt for resources to test their jobs, CSTS guides customer for selecting best cluster configuration in order to minimize the cost. While the existing models do not provide any solution for trust establishment in cloud computing services, CSTS delivers it by implementing security mechanism with the provision of role based access control. The security mechanism proposed in this paper ensures the protection of data and code of different users. Third, CSTS provides a mathematical pricing model to fulfill the expectations of customers and also to maximize the net profit of service providers. Cloud service request model has also been designed that postulates service level agreements between customers and service providers. We have evaluated, compared, and analyzed our framework and have found that it outperforms other existing cloud-based frameworks.     

Energy-aware Virtual Machine Migration for Cloud Computing - A Firefly Optimization Approach

Energy efficiency has grown into a latest exploration area of virtualized cloud computing paradigm. The increase in the number and the size of the cloud data centers has propagated the need for energy efficiency. An extensively practiced technology in cloud computing is live virtual machine migration and is thus focused in this work to save energy. This paper proposes an energy-aware virtual machine migration technique for cloud computing, which is based on the Firefly algorithm. The proposed technique migrates the maximally loaded virtual machine to the least loaded active node while maintaining the performance and energy efficiency of the data centers. The efficacy of the proposed technique is exhibited by comparing it with other techniques using the CloudSim simulator. An enhancement in the average energy consumption of about 44.39 % has been attained by reducing an average of 72.34 % of migrations and saving 34.36 % of hosts, thereby, making the data center more energy-aware.     

Prediction-based proactive load balancing approach through VM migration

The ever-growing intricacy and dynamicity of Cloud Computing Systems has created a need for Proactive Load Balancing which is an effective approach to improve the scalability of today’s Cloud services. In order to manage the load proactively on the Cloud system during application execution, load should be predicted through machine learning approaches and handled through VM migration approaches. Thus, this paper formulates an effort to focus on the research problem of designing a prediction-based approach for facilitating proactive load balancing through the prediction of multiple resource utilization parameters in Cloud. The involvement of this paper is twofold. Firstly, various machine learning approaches have been tested and compared for predicting host overutilization as well as underutilization. Secondly, the load prediction model having maximum accuracy from the tested models has been utilized for implementing the proactive VM migration using multiple resource utilization parameters. Further, the proposed technique has been validated through performance evaluation parameters using CloudSim and Weka toolkits. The simulation results clearly demonstrate that the proposed approach is effective for handling VM migration, reducing SLA Violations, VM migrations, execution mean and standard deviation time.     

Load Balancing and Job Migration Techniques in Grid: A Survey of Recent Trends

Grid computing has recently become one of the most important research topics in the field of computing. The Grid computing paradigm has gained popularity due to its capability to offer easier access to geographically distributed resources operating across multiple administrative domains. The grid environment is considered as a combination of dynamic, heterogeneous and shared resources in order to provide faster and reliable access to the Grid resources, the resource overloading must be prevented which can be obtained by proper load balancing and job migration mechanisms. This paper presents an extensive survey of the existing load balancing and job migration techniques proposed so far. A detailed classification has also been included based on different parameters which are depending on the analysis of the existing techniques, a new Load balancing technique, along with Job Migration approach has been proposed and discussed to fulfill the existing research gaps.     

Improving neural machine translation for low-resource Indian languages using rule-based feature extraction

Neural Computing and Applications - Languages help to unite the world socially, culturally and technologically. Different natives communicate in different languages; there is a tremendous...     

A novel strategy for automatic test data generation using soft computing technique

Software testing is one of the most crucial and analytical aspect to assure that developed software meets prescribed quality standards. Software development process invests at least 50% of the total cost in software testing process. Optimum and efficacious test data design of software is an important and challenging activity due to the nonlinear structure of software. Moreover, test case type and scope determines the quality of test data. To address this issue, software testing tools should employ intelligence based soft computing techniques like particle swarm optimization (PSO) and genetic algorithm (GA) to generate smart and efficient test data automatically. This paper presents a hybrid PSO and GA based heuristic for automatic generation of test suites. In this paper, we described the design and implementation of the proposed strategy and evaluated our model by performing experiments with ten container classes from the Java standard library. We analyzed our algorithm statistically with test adequacy criterion as branch coverage. The performance adequacy criterion is taken as percentage coverage per unit time and percentage of faults detected by the generated test data. We have compared our work with the heuristic based upon GA, PSO, existing hybrid strategies based on GA and PSO and memetic algorithm. The results showed that the test case generation is efficient in our work.