Distributed Scheduling for Advance Bandwidth Reservation in High-Performance Networks

High-performance networks are capable of provisioning dedicated channels through circuit/lambda-switching or MPLS/GMPLS techniques to support large-scale data transfer. These dedicated links are typically shared by multiple users through advance resource reservations, resulting in varying bandwidth availability in future time periods. Most previous efforts were focused on centralized bandwidth scheduling to improve the utilization of network resources and meet the transport requirements of application users. These centralized scheduling schemes imply the use of a central control plane, posing significant reliability and scalability challenges as the network size rapidly grows. We propose distributed algorithms for path computation and bandwidth scheduling in response to four basic bandwidth reservation requests: (i) fixed bandwidth in a fixed slot, (ii) highest bandwidth in a fixed slot, (iii) first slot with fixed bandwidth and duration, and (iv) all slots with fixed bandwidth and duration. These algorithms are developed through a rigorous extension of the classical breadth first search and Bellman-Ford algorithms to a completely distributed manner, and their performances are evaluated and analyzed through extensive simulations.