• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.1164-1183
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• 2019

The rapid development of cloud computing and high requirements of operators requires strong support from the underlying Data Center Networks. Therefore, the effectiveness of using resources in the data center networks becomes a point of concern for operators and material for research. In this paper, we discuss the online virtual-cluster provision problem for multiple tenants with an aim to decide when and where the virtual cluster should be placed in a data center network. Our objective is maximizing the total revenue for the data center networks under the constraints. In order to solve this problem, this paper divides it into two parts: online multi-tenancy scheduling and virtual cluster placement. The first part aims to determine the scheduling orders for the multiple tenants, and the second part aims to determine the locations of virtual machines. We first approach the problem by using the variational inequality model and discuss the existence of the optimal solution. After that, we prove that provisioning virtual clusters for a multi-tenant data center network that maximizes revenue is NP-hard. Due to the complexity of this problem, an efficient heuristic algorithm OMS (Online Multi-tenancy Scheduling) is proposed to solve the online multi-tenancy scheduling problem. We further explore the virtual cluster placement problem based on the OMS and propose a novel algorithm during the virtual machine placement. We evaluate our algorithms through a series of simulations, and the simulations results demonstrate that OMS can significantly increase the efficiency and total revenue for the data centers.