In grid networks, distributed resources are interconnected by wide area network to support compute and data-intensive applications, which require reliable and efficient transfer of gigabits (even terabits) of data. Different from best-effort traffic in Internet, bulk data transfer in grid requires bandwidth reservation as a fundamental service. Existing reservation schemes such as RSVP are designed for real-time traffic specified by reservation rate, transfer start time but with unknown lifetime. In comparison, bulk data transfer requests are defined in terms of volume and deadline, which provide more information, and allow more flexibility in reservation schemes, i.e., transfer start time can be flexibly chosen, and reservation for a single request can be divided into multiple intervals with different reservation rates. We define a flexible reservation framework using time-rate function algebra, and identify a series of practical reservation scheme families with increasing generality and potential performance, namely, FixTime-FixRate, FixTime-FlexRate, FlexTime-FlexRate, and Multi-Interval. Simple heuristics are used to select representative scheme from each family for performance comparison. Simulation results show that the increasing flexibility can potentially improve system performance, minimizing both blocking probability and mean flow time. We also discuss the distributed implementation of proposed framework.
@cite_10: Calls that make large, persistent demands for network resources will be denied consistent service, unless the network employs adequate control mechanisms. Calls of this type include video conferences. Although overprovisioning network capacity would increase the likelihood of accepting these calls, it is a very expensive option to apply uniformly in a large network, especially as the calls require high bandwidth and low blocking probabilities. Such large calls typically require coordination of geographically distributed facilities and people at the end systems. So it is natural to book the network requirements ahead of their actual use. We present a new, effective admission control algorithm for booking ahead network services. The admission control is based on a novel application of effective bandwidth theory to the time domain. Systematic and comprehensive simulation experiments provide an understanding of how booking ahead affects call blocking and network utilization, considering call duration, number of links, bandwidth, routing, and the mix of book ahead versus immediate arrival traffic. Allowing some calls to book ahead radically reduces their chance of service denial, while allowing flexible and efficient sharing of network resources with normal calls that do not book ahead.
@cite_2: In general, two types of resource reservations in computer networks can be distinguished: immediate reservations which are made in a just-in-time manner and advance reservations which allow to reserve resources a long time before they are actually used. Advance reservations are especially useful for grid computing but also for a variety of other applications that require network quality-of-service, such as content distribution networks or even mobile clients, which need advance reservation to support handovers for streaming video. With the emerged MPLS standard, explicit routing can be implemented also in IP networks, thus overcoming the unpredictable routing behavior which so far prevented the implementation of advance reservation services. The impact of such advance reservation mechanisms on the performance of the network with respect to the amount of admitted requests and the allocated bandwidth has so far not been examined in detail. We show that advance reservations can lead to a reduced performance of the network with respect to both metrics. The analysis of the reasons shows a fragmentation of the network resources. In advance reservation environments, additional new services can be defined such as malleable reservations and can lead to an increased performance of the network. Four strategies for scheduling malleable reservations are presented and compared. The results of the comparisons show that some strategies increase the resource fragmentation and are therefore unsuitable in the considered environment while others lead to a significantly better performance of the network. Besides discussing the performance issue, the software architecture of a management system for advance reservations is presented.
Time-indexed reservation is needed when considering advance reservation of bandwidth @cite_10 , which allows requesting bandwidth before actual transfer is ready to happen. For example, a scheduled tele-conference may reserve bandwidth for a specified future time interval. @cite_2 shows that advance reservation causes bandwidth fragmentation in time axis, which may significantly reduce accept probability of requests arriving later. To address the problem, they propose the concept of , which defines advance reservation request with flexible start time and rate.