Bandwidth Reservation Strategies for Scheduling Maximization in Dedicated Networks

Bandwidth reservation has been increasingly used in high-performance networks to provide quality of service for various applications ranging from real-time multimedia communication in early years to big data transfer more recently. In this paper, we consider multiple bandwidth reservation requests in a batch awaiting to be scheduled in a dedicated network, and formulate two scheduling maximization problems: 1) maximize the amount of data to be transferred and 2) maximize the number of requests to be scheduled. We prove both problems are NP-complete and very difficult to approximate. We then design two heuristic algorithms and evaluate their performance against a scheduling algorithm widely used in real production networks through extensive simulation-based experiments. The experimental results show that the proposed heuristic algorithms achieve significantly better overall scheduling performance than the existing algorithm.