Optimizing Trade-Off Between Cost and Performance of Data Transfers Using Bandwidth Reservation in Dedicated Networks

Because of the solid performance of providing quality of service for various applications for decades, bandwidth reservation has been increasingly used in recent years for large amounts of data transfer to achieve guaranteed performance. However, effective scheduling strategy to achieve the trade-off between data transfer cost and data transfer performance still remains to be investigated. In this paper, we focus on the trade-off between cost and the most common performance parameter, i.e., completion time, of data transfers using bandwidth reservation in dedicated networks. We consider the scheduling of two types of bandwidth reservation requests regarding such trade-off: (1) to achieve the minimum data transfer cost given the data transfer deadline, and (2) to achieve the earliest data transfer completion time given the maximum data transfer cost. We propose two bandwidth reservation algorithms with rigorous optimality proofs to optimize the scheduling of these two types of bandwidth reservation requests. We then compare the proposed algorithms with two scheduling algorithms originating from one widely used scheduling algorithm in production networks, and the efficacy of the proposed optimal algorithms is verified through extensive simulations.