Allocation of Publisher/Subscriber Data Links on a Set of Virtual Machines

There is an increasing interest in applications where sensors or other devices (acting as publishers) may generate data that are processed and analyzed by specialized software components (acting as subscribers to this data) that extract useful information in a variety of scientific or industrial settings. As a result of the large volumes of data that are often generated, Cloud infrastructures may be used to handle the data links between publishers and subscribers. Assuming that a certain number of virtual machines of some given bandwidth have been booked for this purpose, the problem that this paper considers is how to allocate data links to the virtual machines so that the amount of data received by subscribers is maximized. An Integer Linear Programming formulation of the problem and two heuristics are presented, which are evaluated in a range of experiments.