MHND: Multi-Homing Network Design Model for Delay Sensitive Distributed Processing Applications

When mission-critical applications are provided over a network, high availability is required in addition to a low delay network. This paper proposes a multi-homing network design model, named MHND, to balance a low delay and high availability when distributed processing applications use multiple processing servers. MHND maintains the event occurrence order with a multi-homing configuration using conservative synchronization. We formulate MHND as an integer linear programming problem to minimize the delay. We prove that the distributed server allocation problem with MHND is NP-complete. Numerical results indicate that, as a multi-homing number, which is the number of servers to which each user belongs, increases, the availability increases while increasing the delay. Two or more multi-homing can achieve approximately an order of magnitude higher availability compared to that of the conventional single-homing at the expense of a delay increase of 1.25 times. By using MHND, flexible network design is achieved based on the acceptable delay in service and the required availability.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a multi-homing network design model named MHND, which balances low delay and high availability for distributed processing applications. MHND maintains event occurrence order using conservative synchronization and formulates an integer linear programming problem to minimize delay. Numerical results show that increasing the number of multi-homing servers improves availability but also increases delay. Two or more multi-homing can achieve approximately 10 times higher availability compared to single-homing at the cost of a 1.25 times delay increase. MHND enables flexible network design based on required availability and acceptable delay.