An adaptive allocation scheme for load balancing and SLA maintenance in multi-location data center networks

Allocation of resources in data centers (DCs) needs to be done in a dynamic fashion for cloud enterprise customers who require virtualized reservation-oriented services on demand. Due to the spatial diversity of data centers, the cost of using different DCs also varies. In this paper, we propose an allocation scheme to balance the load among these DCs with different cost to minimize the total provisioning cost in a dynamic environment while ensuring that the service level agreements (SLAs) are met. Compared to a benchmark scheme (where all requests are first sent to the cheapest data center), our scheme can decrease the proportional utilization from 24% (for heavy load) to 30% (for normal load) and achieve a significant balance in the cost incurred by individual DCs. Our scheme can also achieve 7.5% reduction in total provisioning cost under certain service level agreement (SLA) in exchange of low increment in blocking. Finally, we tested our heuristic on 5 DCs to show that our allocation scheme follows the weighted cost proportionally.