BHyPreC: A Novel Bi-LSTM Based Hybrid Recurrent Neural Network Model to Predict the CPU Workload of Cloud Virtual Machine

With the advancement of cloud computing technologies, there is an ever-increasing demand for the maximum utilization of cloud resources. It increases the computing power consumption of the cloud’s systems. Consolidation of cloud’s Virtual Machines (VMs) provides a pragmatic approach to reduce the energy consumption of cloud Data Centers (DC). Effective VM consolidation and VM migration without breaching Service Level Agreement (SLA) can be attained by taking proactive decisions based on cloud’s future workload prediction. Effective task scheduling, another major issue of cloud computing also relies on accurate forecasting of resource usage. Cloud workload traces exhibit both periodic and non-periodic patterns with the sudden peak of load. As a result, it is very challenging for the prediction models to precisely forecast future workload. This prompted us to propose a hybrid Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based prediction model named BHyPreC. BHyPreC architecture includes Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) on top of the stacked Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). Here, BHyPreC is used to predict future CPU usage workload of cloud’s VM. Our proposed model enhances the non-linear data analysis capability of Bi-LSTM, LSTM, and GRU models separately and demonstrates better accuracy compared to other statistical models. The effect of variation of historical window size and training-testing data size on these models is observed. The experimental result shows that our model gives higher accuracy and performs better in comparison to Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), LSTM, GRU, and Bi-LSTM model for both short-term ahead and long-term ahead prediction.