Scheduling network requests with transmission window

We consider the problem of bulk data transfers and bandwidth sharing in the context of grid infrastructures. Grid computing empowers high-performance computing in a large-scale distributed environment. Network bandwidth, which makes the expensive computational and storage resources work in concert, plays an active role on performance. Due to specific traffic patterns, network topology and application scenarios, bandwidth sharing encounters new challenges. From this perspective, this research report looks at bulk transfers among computing and storage elements. Referred to as short-lived, transfer requests with transmission window and volume are scheduled in the network. By manipulating the transmission window, the request accept rate and network resource utilization are to be optimized. The formulated optimization problem is proven NP-complete. Associated with proposed heuristics, simulations are carried out to study each bandwidth sharing strategy and its application scenarios. A tuning factor, that allows adaptation of performance objective, is introduced to adjust network infrastructure and workload.