Advanced channel reservation is emerging as an important feature of ultra high-speed networks requiring the transfer of large files. Applications include scientific data transfers and database backup. In this paper, we present two new, on-line algorithms for advanced reservation, called BatchAll and BatchLim, that are guaranteed to achieve optimal throughput performance, based on multi-commodity flow arguments. Both algorithms are shown to have polynomial-time complexity and provable bounds on the maximum delay for 1+epsilon bandwidth augmented networks. The BatchLim algorithm returns the completion time of a connection immediately as a request is placed, but at the expense of a slightly looser competitive ratio than that of BatchAll. We also present a simple approach that limits the number of parallel paths used by the algorithms while provably bounding the maximum reduction factor in the transmission throughput. We show that, although the number of different paths can be exponentially large, the actual number of paths needed to approximate the flow is quite small and proportional to the number of edges in the network. Simulations for a number of topologies show that, in practice, 3 to 5 parallel paths are sufficient to achieve close to optimal performance. The performance of the competitive algorithms are also compared to a greedy benchmark, both through analysis and simulation.
Another recent work @cite_28 , focusing on routing in packet switched network in an adversarial setting, discusses choosing routes for fixed size packets injected by an adversary. It enforces regularity limitations on the adversary which are stronger than the ones required here, and achieves the network capacity with a guarantee on the maximum queue size. It does not discuss the case of advance reservation with different job sizes or bandwidth requirements. It is based upon approximating an integer programming, which may not be extensible to a case where path reservation, rather than packet-based routing is involved.
@cite_28
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We study routing and scheduling in packet-switched networks. We assume an adversary that controls the injection time, source, and destination for each packet injected. A set of paths for these packets is admissible if no link in the network is overloaded. We present the first on-line routing algorithm that finds a set of admissible paths whenever this is feasible. Our algorithm calculates a path for each packet as soon as it is injected at its source using a simple shortest path computation. The length of a link reflects its current congestion. We also show how our algorithm can be implemented under today's Internet routing paradigms.When the paths are known (either given by the adversary or computed as above), our goal is to schedule the packets along the given paths so that the packets experience small end-to-end delays. The best previous delay bounds for deterministic and distributed scheduling protocols were exponential in the path length. In this article, we present the first deterministic and distributed scheduling protocol that guarantees a polynomial end-to-end delay for every packet.Finally, we discuss the effects of combining routing with scheduling. We first show that some unstable scheduling protocols remain unstable no matter how the paths are chosen. However, the freedom to choose paths can make a difference. For example, we show that a ring with parallel links is stable for all greedy scheduling protocols if paths are chosen intelligently, whereas this is not the case if the adversary specifies the paths.