Priority-aware VM Allocation and Network Bandwidth Provisioning in SDN-Clouds

In the multi-tenant architecture of cloud computing, different applications would have different requirements and priorities. In the case of network congestion within a cloud data center, failure of transferring data on time may cause a significant performance degradation of an application. It may result in a severe failure for a critical application that needs a certain level of QoS satisfaction. In order to avoid such failure, efficient resource provisioning techniques are necessary to ensure transferring the high-priority data over the other traffics even in network congestion. In SDN-enabled cloud data center, this is possible by reconfiguring network flows dynamically adapting the network traffic. In this paper, we propose priority-aware resource placement algorithms considering both host and network resources. Our priority-aware VM allocation (PAVA) algorithm places VMs of the priority application to closely connected hosts to reduce the chance of network congestion caused by other tenants and allocates sufficient computing and networking resources. The required bandwidth of a critical application is also guaranteed by bandwidth allocation with a configuration of priority queues on each networking device in a data center network managed by SDN controller. Our experiment results show that the combination of proposed approaches can allocate sufficient resources for high priority applications to meet the application’s QoS requirement in a multi-tenant cloud data center.