Higher bandwidth may sometimes reduce cloud application performance

Cloud computing has experienced explosive growth in last ten years. Since cloud applications usually come up with large amounts of data transfer, the network capability becomes one of the dominant performance factors. Judging from common sense, it seems obvious that the higher quantity of bandwidth guaranteed for a job, the higher performance we will achieve. Rather, in this paper, we found that the effect of providing higher bandwidth guarantee turns to be uncertain. Without efficient work and flow scheduling mechanism, merely increasing the bandwidth allocated for the job may actually be as harmful as reducing the bandwidth.