Dynamic Pricing and Traffic Engineering for Timely Inter-Datacenter Transfers
Virajith Jalaparti, Ivan Bliznets, Srikanth Kandula, Brendan Lucier, Ishai Menache · 2016
Neither traffic engineering nor fixed prices (e.g., \$/GB) alone fully address the challenges of highly utilized inter-datacenter WANs. The former offers more service to users who overstate their demands and poor service overall. The latter offers no service guarantees to customers, and providers have no lever to steer customer demand to lightly loaded paths/times. To address these issues, we design and evaluate Pretium -- a framework that combines dynamic pricing with traffic engineering for inter-datacenter bandwidth. In Pretium, users specify their required rates or transfer sizes with deadlines, and a price module generates a price quote for different guarantees (promises) on these requests. The price quote is generated using internal prices (which can vary over time and links) which are maintained and periodically updated by Pretium based on history. A supplementary schedule adjustment module gears the agreed-upon network transfers towards an efficient operating point by optimizing time-varying operation costs. Experiments using traces from a large production WAN show that Pretium improves total system efficiency (value of routed transfers minus operation costs) by more than 3.5X relative to current usage-based pricing schemes, while increasing the provider profits by 2X.