More Requests, Less Cost： Uncertain Inter-Datacenter Traffic Transmission with Multi-Tier Pricing

摘要

With the multi-tier pricing scheme provided by most of the cloud service providers （CSPs）, the cloud userstypically select a high enough transmission service level to ensure the quality of service （QoS）, due to the severe penalty ofmissing the transmission deadline. This leads to the so-called over-provisioning problem, which increases the transmissioncost of the cloud user. Given the fact that cloud users may not be aware of their traffic demand before accessing the network,the over-provisioning problem becomes more serious. In this paper, we investigate how to reduce the transmission cost fromthe perspective of cloud users, especially when they are not aware of their traffic demand before the transmission deadline.The key idea is to split a long-term transmission request into several short ones. By selecting the most suitable transmissionservice level for each short-term request, a cost-efiqcient inter-datacenter transmission service level selection framework isobtained. We further formulate the transmission service level selection problem as a linear programming problem andresolve it in an on-line style with Lyapunov optimization. We evaluate the proposed approach with real traffic data. Theexperimental results show that our method can reduce the transmission cost by up to 65.04%.