Context-aware Job Scheduling for Cloud Computing Environments

The more instrumented society is demanding smarter services to help coordinate daily activities and exceptional situations. Applications become sophisticated and context-aware as the pervasiveness of technology increases. In order to cope with resource limitations of mobile-based environments, it is a common practice to delegate processing intensive components to a Cloud Computing infrastructure. In this scenario, executions of server-based jobs are still dependent on the local variations of the end-user context. We claim that there is a need for an advanced model for smarter services that combines techniques of context awareness and adaptive job scheduling. This model aims at rationalising the resource utilisation in a Cloud Computing environment, while leading to significant improvement of quality of service. In this paper, we introduce such a model and describe its performance benefits through a combination of social and service simulations. We analyse the results by demonstrating gains in performance, quality of service, reduction of wasted jobs, and improvement of overall end-user experience.