Balanar: Balancing deadline guarantee and Jain's fairness for inter-datacenter transfers

With the rising quality of service (QoS) requirements on network transmission, fairness and deadline guarantee have become the two most critical indicators on the rationality of network resource allocation and the timeliness of network transmission. However, deadline guarantee and fairness are conflicting objectives that cannot be ensured simultaneously. More specifically, preemptive scheduling policies ensure more inter-datacenter transfers can be finished before their deadlines but cause starvation, while fairly sharing network bandwidth among inter-datacenter transfers ensures fairness but cause deadlines missing. Although the state -of-the-art works have considered fairness and deadline guarantee simultaneously, a mechanism that can flexibly balance these two conflicting objectives is still missing. In this paper, we propose a decentralized traffic scheduling mechanism called Balanar. It achieves flexible trade-offs between long-term Jain's fairness and utility of guaranteeing inter-datacenter transfers' deadlines by finding the On-line Optimal Utility-Jain's Fairness Trade-off (O2UJT) bandwidth allocation profiles, which maximize utility while ensuring long-term Jain's fairness is higher than a threshold. However, finding the O2UJT bandwidth allocation profiles corresponds to solving a family of complex piece-wise non-convex optimization problems. Thus, we propose a dynamic particle swarm based heuristic algorithm to alleviate this difficulty. Finally, experimental results show Balanar can achieve flexible trade-offs between fairness and utility of guaranteeing transfers' deadlines without damaging the other network performance indicators.