Delay tolerant bulk data transfers on the internet

Many emerging scientific and industrial applications require transferring multiple Tbytes of data on a daily basis. Examples include pushing scientific data from particle accelerators/colliders to laboratories around the world, synchronizing data-centers across continents, and replicating collections of high definition videos from events taking place at different time-zones. A key property of all above applications is their ability to tolerate delivery delays ranging from a few hours to a few days. Such Delay Tolerant Bulk (DTB) data are currently being serviced mostly by the postal system using hard drives and DVDs, or by expensive dedicated networks. In this work we propose transmitting such data through commercial ISPs by taking advantage of already-paid-for off-peak bandwidth resulting from diurnal traffic patterns and percentile pricing. We show that between sender-receiver pairs with small time-zone difference, simple source scheduling policies are able to take advantage of ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SIGMETRICS
• Authors: Nikolaos Laoutaris, Georgios Smaragdakis, Pablo Rodriguez, Ravi Sundaram
• Keywords: Daily Basis, Delay Tolerant, Hardware, SIGMETRICS 2009, Time-zone Difference