  Burstable billing is widely adopted in practice, e.g., by colocation data
center providers, to charge for their users, e.g., data centers, for data
transferring. However, there is still a lack of research on what the best way
is for a user to manage its workload in response to burstable billing. To
overcome this shortcoming, we propose a novel method to optimally respond to
burstable billing under demand uncertainty. First, we develop a tractable
mathematical expression to calculate the 95th percentile usage of a user, who
is charged by provider via burstable billing for bandwidth usage. This model is
then used to formulate a new bandwidth allocation problem to maximize the
user's surplus, i.e., its net utility minus cost. Additionally, we examine
different non-convex solution methods for the formulated stochastic
optimization problem. We also extend our design to the case where a user can
receive service from multiple providers, who all employ burstable billing.
Using real-world workload traces, we show that our proposed method can reduce
user's bandwidth cost by 26% and increase its total surplus by 23%, compared to
the current practice of allocating bandwidth on-demand.
