Congestion-Aware Traffic Allocation for Geo-Distributed Data Centers

The Inter-datacenter transfer is a fundamental service for global cloud applications. Geo-distributed data centers become an essential resource for their application performance which may be destroyed by network congestion. Recent years, most inter-datacenter transfer methods focus on allocating transfers by bandwidth allocation to achieve low cost or high utilization. However, the congestion condition is rarely considered in these works. In this article, we introduce a congestion-aware traffic allocation method named CONA (CONgestion-Aware), whose target is to maximize the profit of allocation transfer among multiple data centers. On this purpose, a maximizing optimization model is proposed, and an efficient link grading strategy is presented. A matrix transformation method is also introduced to simplify the optimization problem. Furthermore, the link congestion condition is considered by the controller, as well as the prediction on link congestion. To verify our proposed method, simulation model is established and comprehensive experiments are conducted. The experimental results show that our method brings higher profit than fair share and greedy traffic allocation method.