Deadline-aware envy-free admission control in shared datacenter networks

Meeting flow deadlines is crucial for a business running its interactive applications in a shared datacenter. Current deadline-aware transport protocols fall short in terms of throughput and fairness, when datacenter tenants compete for network capacity by their deadline-sensitive traffic. This paper presents an admission control mechanism to work with a deadline-aware transport protocol. Following pay-as-you-use paradigm, we model a revenue-maximizing problem for the mechanism to admit a right fraction of deadline-constrained traffic to the underlying transport layer, while respecting per-flow fairness by an economic notion, envy-free pricing. To tackle fast-changing traffic, we propose a greedy algorithm for the problem in the mechanism, which can easily adopt a batch processing method to mitigate the incurred overhead. By packet-level simulation, we demonstrate that the admission control mechanism sustains high application throughput and good revenues in heavy traffic loads. In addition, we present two service policies, each of which is demonstrated to have a desirable service property in dynamic environments.