Survivable Mapping of Virtual Networks onto a Shared Substrate Network

Abstract

The virtualization of both servers and substrate networks will enable the future Internet architecture to support a variety of Cloud computing services and architectures, and prevent its ossification. Since multiple virtual networks (VN) or virtual infrastructure (VI) and services now share the resources of the same underlying network in a network virtualization environment, it is important that efficient techniques are developed for the mapping of the VNs onto the substrate network. Furthermore, due to the sharing of resources, the survivable design of VNs is also very important, since now even small failures in the substrate network will cause the disruption of a large number of VNs that may be mapped on to the substrate network. In this work, the author studies the problem of survivable virtual network mapping (SVNM) and first formulates the problem using mixed integer linear programming (MILP). The author then devises two kinds of algorithms for solving the SVNM problem efficiently: (1) Lagrangian relaxation-based algorithms including LR-SVNM-M and LR-SVNM-D and (2) Heuristic algorithms including H-SVNM-D and H-SVNM-M. The author then compares the performance of the algorithms with other VI mapping algorithms under various performance metrics using simulation. The simulation results and analysis show that the algorithms can be used to balance the tradeoff between time efficiency and mapping cost.