Elastic service availability: utility framework and optimal provisioning

Service availability is one of the most closely scrutinized metrics in offering network services. It is important to cost-effectively provision a managed and differentiated network with various service availability guarantees under a unified platform. In particular, demands for availability may be elastic and such elasticity can be leveraged to improve cost-effectiveness. In this paper, we establish the framework of provisioning elastic service availability through network utility maximization, and propose an optimal and distributed solution using differentiated failure recovery schemes. First, we develop a utility function with configurable parameters to represent the satisfaction perceived by a user upon service availability as well as its allowed source rate. Second, adopting Quality of Protection [1] and shared path protection, we transform optimal provisioning of elastic service availability into a convex optimization problem. The desirable service availability and source rate fo...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: JSAC
• Authors: Dahai Xu, Ying Li, Mung Chiang, A. Robert Calderbank
• Keywords: Elastic Service Availability, JSAC 2006, JSAC 2008, Provisioning, Service Availability