Review of nature inspired algorithms in cloud computing

Cloud Computing is a major area of research. Nature Inspired Algorithms (NIAs) form the major portion of research going on in the Cloud today. NIAs as the name suggests are the algorithms whose source of inspiration is nature. NIAs can further be classified into algorithms based on Swarm Intelligence (SI), Biological Phenomena (called Bio-inspired BI), Physics and Chemistry systems or based on some other things. SI based algorithms are called intelligent because they are known to learn and improve their performance by observing the output on previous moves made by them. NIAs provide an efficient solution to many real-world optimization problems which are categorized to be NP-Hard Problems. NIAs have a huge list of applications and most of them prove to be more efficient than other algorithms and thus are many a time used in combination to other algorithms in order to improve performance and thus deliver a better QoS. The paper intends to review, classify and briefly describe various NIAs and the principle behind each algorithm so as to inspire further research. The paper also lists the applications of various NIAs. NIAs also find their application in Cluster and Grid Computing.