Guarantees for Mix-flows in Inter-Datacenter WANs in Single and Federated Clouds

Inter-datacenter WANs connect geo-distributed datacenters and carry a considerable amount of traffic, generally a mix of flows. There has been little work done to provide custom guarantees depending on the nature of traffic requirements in such environments. In this paper we address this problem by proposing Vritti, an adaptable spatial-temporal system for traffic engineering in inter-datacenter WAN environments applicable to single and federated clouds. With Vritti, cloud providers can offer tailor-made guarantees to users with widely differing requirements (in terms of hard, soft or no deadlines) and traffic characteristics (in terms of known or unknown traffic volumes). We use linear programming to mathematically formulate the problem with the objective of maximizing utility. We propose two online algorithms to generate admission control, scheduling and routing decisions. Our simulations show that Vritti can effectively meet deadline transfers and provide fairness to non-deadline transfers in both single and federated cloud environments.