Elastic Service Availability: Utility Framework and Optimal Provisioning

Service availability is one of the most closely scrutinized metrics in offering network services. It is important to cost-effectively provision a managed and differentiated network with various service availability guarantees under a unified platform. In particular, demands for availability may be elastic and such elasticity can be leveraged to improve cost-effectiveness. In this paper, the authors establish the framework of provisioning elastic service availability through network utility maximization, and propose an optimal and distributed solution using differentiated failure recovery schemes.