Optimal connectivity to cloud data centers

Abstract

With the increasing dependency of cloud-based services, data centers (DC) have become a popular platform to satisfy customers' requests. Many large network providers now have their own geographically distributed data centers for cloud services, or have partnerships with third party data center providers to route customers' demand. When end customers' requests arrive at a Point-of-Presence (PoP) of a large Internet Service Provider, the provider having DCs in multiple geo-locations needs to decide which DC should serve the request depending on the geo-distance, cost of resources in that DC, availability of the requested resource at that DC, and congestion in the path from the customers' location to that DC. Therefore, an optimal connectivity scheme from the ingress PoP to egress DC is required among the PoPs and DCs to minimize the cost of establishing paths between a PoP and a DC while ensuring load balancing in both the link level and DC level. In this paper, we present a novel mix-integer linear programming (MILP) model for this problem. We show the efficacy of our model through various performance metrics such as average and maximum link utilization, and average number of links used per path.