  Datacenter-based Cloud Computing services provide a flexible, scalable and
yet economical infrastructure to host online services such as multimedia
streaming, email and bulk storage. Many such services perform geo-replication
to provide necessary quality of service and reliability to users resulting in
frequent large inter- datacenter transfers. In order to meet tenant service
level agreements (SLAs), these transfers have to be completed prior to a
deadline. In addition, WAN resources are quite scarce and costly, meaning they
should be fully utilized. Several recently proposed schemes, such as B4,
TEMPUS, and SWAN have focused on improving the utilization of inter-datacenter
transfers through centralized scheduling, however, they fail to provide a
mechanism to guarantee that admitted requests meet their deadlines. Also, in a
recent study, authors propose Amoeba, a system that allows tenants to define
deadlines and guarantees that the specified deadlines are met, however, to
admit new traffic, the proposed system has to modify the allocation of already
admitted transfers. In this paper, we propose Rapid Close to Deadline
Scheduling (RCD), a close to deadline traffic allocation technique that is fast
and efficient. Through simulations, we show that RCD is up to 15 times faster
than Amoeba, provides high link utilization along with deadline guarantees, and
is able to make quick decisions on whether a new request can be fully satisfied
before its deadline.
