EcoFlow: An Economical and Deadline-Driven Inter-datacenter Video Flow Scheduling System

Abstract

As video streaming applications are deployed on the cloud, cloud providers are charged by ISPs for inter-data enter transfers under the dominant percentile-based charging models. In order to minimize the payment costs, existing works aim to keep the traffic on each link under the charging volume (i.e., 95th percentile traffic volume from the beginning of a charging period up to current time). However, these methods cannot fully utilize each link's available bandwidth capacity, and may increase the charging volumes. To further reduce the bandwidth payment cost by fully utilizing link bandwidth, we propose an economical and deadline-driven video flow scheduling system, called EcoFlow. Considering different video flows have different transmission deadlines, EcoFlow transmits videos in the order of their deadline tightness and postpones the deliveries of later-deadline videos to later time slots so that the charging volume at current time interval will not increase. The flows that are expected to miss their deadlines are divided into sub flows to be rerouted to other underutilized links in order to meet their deadlines without increasing charging volumes. Experimental results on Planet Lab and EC2 show that compared to existing methods, EcoFlow achieves the least bandwidth costs for cloud providers.