Bandwidth Planning of Web Services in Changing Contexts Based on Network Simulation

Minimizing network usage is often a key driver of cost control for web services in the cloud. Most of the literature focuses on resources such as CPU, memory, and disk but the bandwidth is somehow neglected. In fact, it's very challenging to predict the network throughput of modern web services due to the factors of miscellaneous service responses and complex network transportation. Previously we proposed a what-if analysis approach named Log2Sim to predict bandwidth consumption and response time of web services based on network simulation, however, how to use it to address bandwidth problems in different changing contexts is not well studied. In this paper, we work this out with some extensions of Log2Sim, and a general process of bandwidth planning in different changing contexts is given. We also use a classic web benchmark and design various controlled experiments to evaluate this extended approach from different perspectives in multiple scenarios.