Network Bandwidth Allocation Problem For Cloud Computing

Cloud computing enables ubiquitous, convenient, and on-demand network access to a shared pool of computing resources. Cloud computing technologies create tremendous commercial values in various areas, while many scientific challenges have arisen accordingly. The process of transmitting data through networks is characterized by some distinctive characteristics such as nonlinear, nonconvex and even noncontinuous cost functions generated by pricing schemes, periodically updated network topology, as well as replicable data within network nodes. Because of these characteristics, data transfer scheduling is a very challenging problem both engineeringly and scientifically. On the other hand, the cost for bandwidth is a major component of the operating cost for cloud providers, and thus how to save bandwidth cost is extremely important for them to supply service with minimized cost. We propose the Network Bandwidth Allocation (NBA) problem for cloud computing and formulate it as an integer programming model on a high level, with which more comprehensive and rigorous scientific studies become possible. We also show that the NBA problem captures some of the major cloud computing scenarios including the content delivery network (CDN), the live video delivery network (LVDN), the real-time communication network (RTCN), and the cloud wide area network (Cloud-WAN).