On-Demand Bandwidth Pricing For Congestion Control In Core Switches In Cloud Networks

The cloud networks use switches to transfer inbound and outbound traffic through the data centers. Access of multiple tenants to the limited bandwidth capacity over the network switches increases the data traffic congestion in the network. The highly congested switches are vulnerable to get overloaded, and consequently slow down the flow of data traffic in the network. This paper proposes a nonlinear pricing policy for on-demand bandwidth allocation that jointly maximizes the total satisfaction of tenants and minimizes the congestion in the core switches. The optimal schedule is found through the best response strategy, in which each tenant updates its bandwidth allocation at each step based on the updated load-dependent predetermined nonlinear bandwidth pricing functions. The updated bandwidth allocations converge to the optimal bandwidth schedule that balances the load over the core switches. The performance of proposed pricing policy is evaluated under different scenarios.