Routing and Scheduling File Transfers in Packet-Switched Networks

Data traffic in networks has always been dominated by file transfers, an observation that has motivated previous work in scheduling file transfers. While these previous research contributions address file transfers, they do not address the special considerations required of packet-switched networks, in particular the issues of routing and of simultaneous transmissions of files. In this paper, we generalize previous formulations of the problem to include routing and to allow for simultaneous transmissions of several files. A few theoretical results are presented. Keywords: Data transfers, File transfers, Scheduling, Routing, Large scale networking applications, NP-Completeness, Algorithms. 560 1 Introduction We consider the joint problem of scheduling and routing the transfers of very large files. Our research is motivated by the increasing size and ambition of future networking applications, many of which will result in the movement of very large amounts of data across networks. Fo..