Design and evaluation of a flexible Advance bandwidth Reservation Algorithm for media production networks

In media production companies, exchanging large media files is daily business. Due to the predictable nature of network transfers in the media production industry, timeslot-based advance bandwidth reservation results in higher bandwidth utilization and improved network performance. Timeslot-based advance reservation can be based on flexible or fixed timeslot sizes. As the flexible approach is highly beneficial under bursty and limited network traffic conditions, this paper focuses on that approach. We design, implement and evaluate a novel algorithm based on flexible timeslots, taking into account the specific characteristics of media transfers and compare it with a fixed timeslot algorithm to quantitatively study the quality and complexity of both scenarios. We have defined a set of realistic media production use cases that serve as a basis for the evaluations. Results shows that the highest admittance ratio is consistently achieved by using the flexible time interval algorithm, while the execution time of this approach is up to 12 times lower, compared to the approach with fixed timeslot sizes.