Interesting #13 here (well, they’re all interesting): 25 radical network research projects you should know about.

This points us to Cloud Control with Distributed Rate Limiting which is a paper about distributed bandwidth management.

From the conclusion:

As cloud-based services transition from marketing vaporware to real, deployed systems, the demands on traditional Web-hosting and Internet service providers are likely to shift dramatically. In particular, current models of resource provisioning and accounting lack the flexibility to effectively support the dynamic composition and rapidly shifting load enabled by the software as a service paradigm. We have identified one key aspect of this problem, namely the need to rate limit network traffc in a distributed fashion, and provided two novel algorithms to address this pressing need.

Check out the summary at networkworld but also here is an excerpt from a UCSD post about it:

If half your company’s bandwidth is allocated to your mirror in New York, and it’s the middle of the night there, and your sites in London and Tokyo are slammed, that New York bandwidth is going to waste. UC San Diego computer scientists have designed, implemented, and evaluated a new bandwidth management system for cloud-based applications capable of solving this problem.

The UCSD algorithm enables distributed rate limiters to work together to enforce global bandwidth rate limits, and dynamically shift bandwidth allocations across multiple sites or networks, according to current network demand.”