Bandwidth allocation for communicating virtual machines in cloud data centers

Abstract

High-performance computing in a cloud environment may require massive data transfer among some of the virtual machines (VMs). These VMs are deployed in physical machines (hosts) of a data center. The data transfer among the communicating VMs may use the same shared communication links of the data center. Hence, it is important to have efficient bandwidth allocation policies for different data transfer requests (DTRs) which result in better utilization of bandwidth and fair allocation among the DTRs. In this paper, a few bandwidth allocation policies are proposed and their performances are analyzed. While designing these policies, the objective is the maximization of throughput and bandwidth utilization while minimizing the service time and turnaround time. Some of the policies are based on integer linear programming (ILP) which runs in exponential time while others are based on polynomial-time heuristics. Experimental results show that the performances of heuristic-based policies are comparable to those given by ILP-based exponential time policies.