Bundling communication messages in large scale cloud environments

Cloud computing has been receiving a growing attention due to its features on the provisioning of computing resources for distributed processing. A lot of interest lays on the enabled benefits of flexible and elastic management of cheap and reliable computing sources though virtualization. The cheap characteristic brought from virtualization helps data centers to host more than one operating system on any machine. However, the time-sharing nature of virtualization and the existence of more software layers lead to larger delays in execution and network communications. The bundling of network messages directed to the same destination can be used as means to reduce the number of network transfers. In this paper, the effect of different message bundling aspects closely related to cloud applications is investigated. Analysis shows that message bundling effectively enhances communication efficiency; however, it is directly influenced by parameters such as number of messages, length of the bundling cycle, and number processing units.! Thus, the highest performance gain is achieved by flexibly adjusting according bundling parameters towards data communication in large-scale cloud environments.