  The delivery of bulk data is an increasingly pressing problem in modern
networks. While in some cases these transfers happen in background without
specific constraints in terms of delivery times, there are a number of
scenarios in which the transfer of tens of GB of data must occur in specific,
limited time windows. In order to face this task, a suitable solution is the
deployment of virtual links with guaranteed bandwidth between endpoints
provided by a Service Overlay Network (SON) provider. We model this scenario as
an optimization problem, in which the target consists of minimizing the costs
of the virtual links provided by the SON and the unknowns are the provisioned
bandwidths of these links. Since the resulting objective function is neither
continuous nor convex, the solution of this problem is really challenging for
standard optimization tools in terms of both convergence time and solution
optimality. We propose a solution based on an heuristic approach which uses the
min-plus algebra. Numerical results show that the proposed heuristic
outperforms the considered optimization tools, whilst maintaining an affordable
computation time.
