Abstract
Cloud computing is an emerging technology that provides functions of traditional computing as services via the Internet. Cloud job scheduling mechanisms try to allocate cloud resources to users' submitted jobs in an optimal way. Several metaheuristic algorithms are used to obtain the optimum scheduling solution, such as genetic algorithm, glowworm swarm optimization and cat swarm optimization.This study introduced an optimal metaheuristic job scheduling method using chemical reaction optimization (CRO). Chemical reaction optimization is a new metaheuristic algorithm inspired from the interactions of molecules to achieve the lowest energy state possible during a chemical reaction. CRO mimics molecules' interaction in chemical reaction microscopically. The CRO mechanism simulates the interactions of chemical reaction molecules to find out the lowest energy value possible. The proposed mechanism represents the molecular structure of each molecule as a vector of integer values, each of which represents a feasible cloud job scheduling solution. The potential energy (PE) of each molecule represents its fitness in the objective function that denotes cloud scheduling execution time. Simulation using CloudSim simulator is used to evaluate the proposed CRO mechanism. A comparison with glowworm swarm optimization, cat swarm optimization and first come first served scheduling mechanism is made. The results of simulation showed that the CRO scheduling method has the shortest execution time among all other scheduling mechanisms.