An Approach towards Resource Efficient Virtual Network Embedding

Network virtualization is at the heart of efforts to end Internet ossification, and utilize network infrastructure efficiently. The key concept is to share the infrastructure resources among many users at the same time and in such a way to enable them to deploy the required architectures. This leads to virtual networks (VNs), demanding different resources that have to be embedded on the underlying shared infrastructure network. The requirements of a VN can be based on factors such as, the type of traffic it needs to carry. Some portion of the same resources (substrate resources) needs to be assigned to every VN and the substrate resources are also finite. Thus, a mechanism needs to be devised in order to schedule the resources. This embedding process with resource constraints on virtual nodes and links to be applied on the substrate, which also has limited resources, is challenging and corresponds to the category of NP-hard problems. In this paper, we propose an approach to solve this problem by mapping the vertices of the VN as closely as possible in the substrate network and then assigning virtual edges to the shortest paths which satisfy their demands. This could enable the substrate to accommodate more VNs in the same resource database and hence optimize the substrate’s bandwidth utilization. To the best of our knowledge closest node mapping proposed in this solution is a novel approach and is evaluated and compared to the existing approach of greedy node mapping in different scenarios. The sensitivity analysis by varying the different parameters and their effect on mapping VNs is also presented.