Abstract
A wide range of scientific disciplines are generating large amounts of data at a high speed, which must be transferred to remote sites for real-time processing. Reserving bandwidths over dedicated channels in high-performance networks (HPNs) within a specified time interval has proved to be an effective solution to such high-demanding data transfer. Given a bandwidth reservation request, if the desired bandwidth within the specified time interval cannot be satisfied, most of the existing scheduling algorithms simply reject the request, which would immediately terminate the application. One reasonable approach to mitigate this issue is to provide an alternative bandwidth reservation option to schedule the desired bandwidth within the time interval closest to the specified one. We propose a flexible bandwidth reservation algorithm that considers both the best and alternative bandwidth reservation options for a given request. Extensive simulations are conducted to show the superior performance of the proposed scheduling algorithm compared with a heuristic approach adapted from existing scheduling algorithms.
