Application Utility-based Bandwidth Allocation Scheme for Data Center Networks

The key infrastructure of Cloud Computing is data center which is shared by many tenants. Each tenant's application competes for acquiring more network bandwidth in order to maximize its utility. However, this may cause interference among these diverse applications. Malicious competition not only degrades its performance, but also makes the overall performance of the data center poor and ineffective. To ensure the Quality of Services (QoS) and achieve high network utilization, in this paper, we propose a bandwidth allocation scheme for data center networks (DCNs), which is based on an application utility-based model. In our scheme, multi-path feature of DCN is leveraged to improve the network utilization, and utility functions are constructed to differentiate the throughput and delay sensibilities of different applications. Moreover, our scheme is suitable for arbitrary DCN topologies and without modification on current hardware. The numerical simulation shows that our scheme can provide bandwidth guarantee, fine-grained service differentiation and achieve high network utilization.