  Cloud computing enables ubiquitous, convenient, and on-demand network access
to a shared pool of computing resources. Cloud computing technologies create
tremendous commercial values in various areas, while many scientific challenges
have arisen accordingly. The process of transmitting data through networks is
characterized by some distinctive characteristics such as nonlinear, nonconvex
and even noncontinuous cost functions generated by pricing schemes,
periodically updated network topology, as well as replicable data within
network nodes. Because of these characteristics, data transfer scheduling is a
very challenging problem both engineeringly and scientifically. On the other
hand, the cost for bandwidth is a major component of the operating cost for
cloud providers, and thus how to save bandwidth cost is extremely important for
them to supply service with minimized cost. We propose the Network Bandwidth
Allocation (NBA) problem for cloud computing and formulate it as an integer
programming model on a high level, with which more comprehensive and rigorous
scientific studies become possible. We also show that the NBA problem captures
some of the major cloud computing scenarios including the content delivery
network (CDN), the live video delivery network (LVDN), the real-time
communication network (RTCN), and the cloud wide area network (Cloud-WAN).
