NETWORK SCHEDULING

• US 20170126492A1
• Filed: 05/15/2014
• Published: 05/04/2017
• Est. Priority Date: 05/15/2014
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP (Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Company)
• Original Assignee: Hewlett-Packard Company (HP Inc.)
• Inventors: Law, David, HISCOCK, James S
• Granted Patent: US 10,567,221 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 12/6418 Hybrid transport
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/0806 for initial configuration or provisioning, e.g. plug-and-play
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 43/08 Monitoring or testing based on specific metrics, e.g. QoS, energy consumption or environmental parameters
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 47/70 Admission control; Resource allocation
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 47/83 based on usage prediction
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 69/329 in the application layer [OSI layer 7]

Abstract

In one implementation, a network scheduling method includes collecting information describing pending traffic for a network and generating a plurality of initial scheduling plans for network resources associated with the pending traffic within the network. The network scheduling method also includes analyzing a plurality of scheduling plans derived from the plurality of initial scheduling plans, and defining a current scheduling plan for the network resources from the plurality of scheduling plans.

Claims

1. A network scheduling method, comprising:

collecting information describing pending traffic for a network;

generating a plurality of initial scheduling plans for network resources associated with the pending traffic within the network;

analyzing a plurality of scheduling plans derived from the plurality of initial scheduling plans; and

defining a current scheduling plan for the network resources from the plurality of scheduling plans.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

receiving information describing the pending traffic in the network from a plurality of network applications via a control plane of the network.

3. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

tuning the initial scheduling plans according to one or more traffic tuning parameters to derive the plurality of scheduling plans from the plurality of initial scheduling plans.

4. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

generating a plurality of network configuration instructions to configure the network resources to realize the current scheduling plan; and

providing the plurality of network configuration instructions to the network resources via a control plane of the network.

5. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

determining a plurality of inactive periods associated with energy conservation modes of a plurality of the network resources,

each scheduling plan from the plurality of scheduling plans including a combination of inactive periods and associated with an energy conservation measure,

the defining the current scheduling plan based on the energy conservation measure associated with each scheduling plan from the plurality of scheduling plans.

6. A network scheduling system, comprising:

an aggregation engine to provide a plurality of initial scheduling plans for network resources associated with pending traffic within a network;

a tuning system to tune the initial scheduling plans to generate a plurality of tuned scheduling plans for the network resources; and

an analysis engine to analyze the plurality of tuned scheduling plans and to define a current scheduling plan from the plurality of tuned scheduling plans.

7. The system of claim 6, further comprising:

a deployment engine to generate a plurality of network configuration instructions to configure the network resources to realize the current scheduling plan.

8. The system of claim 6, wherein:

the aggregation engine is to receive information describing the pending traffic from a plurality of network application via a control plane of the network; and

the aggregation engine is to generate the initial scheduling plans from the information describing the pending traffic and a plurality of network paths within the network available for pending traffic, each network path from the plurality of network paths including two or more network resources from the plurality of network resources.

9. The system of claim 6, wherein the tuning system includes a plurality of tuning engines, each tuning engine from the plurality of tuning engines is to store a current scheduling plan and to incrementally generate a tuned scheduling plan from the plurality of tuned scheduling plans based on the current scheduling plan.

10. The system of claim 6, wherein the tuning system includes a plurality of tuning engines, each tuning engine from the plurality of tuning engines is to generate a tuned scheduling plan from the plurality of tuned scheduling plans according to a traffic tuning parameter for that tuning engine from a plurality of traffic tuning parameters and based on the current scheduling plan.

11. The system of claim 6, wherein:

the analysis engine determines a plurality of inactive periods associated with energy conservation modes of a plurality of the network resources,

each tuned scheduling plan from the plurality of tuned scheduling plans including a combination of inactive periods and associated with an energy conservation measure; and

the analysis engine defines the current scheduling plan based on the energy conservation measure associated with each scheduling plan from the plurality of scheduling plans.

12. A network scheduling method, comprising:

tuning a plurality of scheduling plans according to one or more traffic tuning parameters to generate a plurality of tuned scheduling plans for network resources in a network;

defining a current scheduling plan from the plurality of tuned scheduling plans; and

generating a plurality of network configuration instructions to configure the network resources to realize the current scheduling plan.

13. The method of claim 12, further comprising:

generating the plurality of scheduling plans for network resources associated with pending traffic within the network based on information describing pending traffic in a network.

14. The method of claim 12, wherein each tuned scheduling plan from the plurality of tuned scheduling plans is tuned according to a unique traffic tuning parameter from the one or more traffic tuning parameters.

15. The method of claim 12, further comprising:

storing the current scheduling plan,

the defining including accessing the current scheduling plan and incrementally modifying the current scheduling plan.