A novel virtual disk bandwidth allocation framework for data-intensive applications in cloud environments

Abstract

Recently, cloud computing has become a promising distributed processing paradigm to deploy various kinds of non-trivial applications. In those applications, most of them are considered data-intensive and therefore require the cloud system to provide massive storage space as well as desirable I/O performance. As a result, virtual disk technique has been widely applied in many real-world platforms to meet the requirements of these applications. Therefore, how to efficiently allocate the virtual disk bandwidth has become an important issue that needs to be addressed. In this paper, we present a novel virtual disk bandwidth allocation framework, in which a set of virtual bandwidth brokers are introduced to make allocation decisions by playing two game models. Theoretical analysis and solution are presented to prove the effectiveness of the proposed game models. Extensive experiments are conducted on a real-world cloud platform, and the results indicate that the proposed framework can significantly improve the utilisation of virtual disk bandwidth comparing with other existing approaches.