Strategic Cooperation among Datacenter Providers and Optical-Network Carriers for Disaster Recovery

Cooperation among datacenter providers (DCPs) and network carriers is necessary to support today's ubiquitous cloud services. However, such cooperation can be constrained by limited visibility as confidential information, such as network topology, resource availability, etc., may not be disclosed among these entities due to regulatory policies. We study a DCP-carrier cooperation-based service restoration scheme during a disaster with the aid of a third-party mediator, namely a Provider Neutral Exchange (PNE). We propose a novel resource-driven demand-matching strategy to restore DCP services. When multiple DCPs compete for network resources (due to post-disaster resource crunch), resource balancing by PNE can achieve fair and efficient service restoration. To allow flexibility in demand-resource matching, DCPs generate multiple sets of connection requests and define varying priorities and bandwidth degradations for each request. Carriers evaluate the DCP requests and provide feedback (e.g., whether a request can be satisfied or not) based on their available resources. We present an eight-phase DCP-carrier cooperation framework, with each phase employing individual sub-tasks carried out by DCPs, carriers, and PNE. Results under different disaster scenarios show that our strategy significantly improves DCP service restoration, incurring less restoration time.