OSBulk: Optimal Sparse Bulk Transfer

Motivated by the need to accelerate bulk transfers (i.e., flows which transfer files with large sizes) over WAN enterprise networks, we present OSBulk, a system which optimizes sparse bulk transfers over a given network. OSBulk allocates bandwidth to bulk transfers according to an optimal solution to any given multi-commodity flow (MCF) formulation. The key components of OSBulk include logical network provision which sets flow rates and Multiple Path Protocol (MPP) which specifies flow paths. OSBulk can dynamically react to varying network conditions by logical network reprovision and MPP reconfiguration. Evaluation demonstrates that OSBulk is able to achieve near optimal throughput, which improves over the performance of TCP and MPTCP by 1.1 - 2.1× in cloud testing.