  Advanced channel reservation is emerging as an important feature of ultra
high-speed networks requiring the transfer of large files. Applications include
scientific data transfers and database backup. In this paper, we present two
new, on-line algorithms for advanced reservation, called BatchAll and BatchLim,
that are guaranteed to achieve optimal throughput performance, based on
multi-commodity flow arguments. Both algorithms are shown to have
polynomial-time complexity and provable bounds on the maximum delay for
1+epsilon bandwidth augmented networks. The BatchLim algorithm returns the
completion time of a connection immediately as a request is placed, but at the
expense of a slightly looser competitive ratio than that of BatchAll. We also
present a simple approach that limits the number of parallel paths used by the
algorithms while provably bounding the maximum reduction factor in the
transmission throughput. We show that, although the number of different paths
can be exponentially large, the actual number of paths needed to approximate
the flow is quite small and proportional to the number of edges in the network.
Simulations for a number of topologies show that, in practice, 3 to 5 parallel
paths are sufficient to achieve close to optimal performance. The performance
of the competitive algorithms are also compared to a greedy benchmark, both
through analysis and simulation.
