Path Computation with Variable Bandwidth for Bulk Data Transfer in High-Performance Networks

There are an increasing number of high-performance networks that provision dedicated channels through circuit-switching or MPLS/GMPLS techniques to support bulk data transfer in large-scale science or e-commerce applications. These dedicated links are typically shared by multiple users through advance reservations, resulting in varying bandwidth availability in future time periods. Therefore, efficient advance bandwidth reservation algorithms are needed to improve the utilization of network resources and meet the transport requirements of application users. We investigate the bandwidth-oriented path computation problem for two types of data transfer: (i) fixed path with variable bandwidth and (ii) variable path with variable bandwidth to minimize the transfer end time of a given data size. We prove that both problems are NP-complete and propose a heuristic algorithm for each of them. Extensive simulation results illustrate the performance superiority of the proposed heuristics over methods based on greedy strategies.