Heuristic and reinforcement learning-based survivable trust-aware virtual network embedding for IoT networks

Integrating virtual wireless sensor networks (VWSNs) with the Internet of Things (IoT) improves the quality of information (QoI) and quality of service (QoS). It manages wireless interference, critical to providing efficient and reliable services. Among the challenges in IoT-WSN virtualization, the survivable virtual network embedding (SVNE) problem stands out, as it efficiently maps a virtual network request (VNR) onto a WSN substrate while considering potential substrate failures and network security standards. This paper proposes a trust-aware fault recovery mechanism to address the security and survivability of virtualized IoT-WSN applications against physical infrastructure failures with two heuristic and intelligent approaches. Our proposed heuristic approach utilizes a node importance measurement strategy for faulty nodes based on the technique for order of preference by similarity to the ideal solution (TOPSIS) method. On the other hand, in our intelligent approach, we apply the deep Q-Learning (DQL) method to ensure end-to-end failure recovery for both nodes and links and improve physical resource utilization. To maintain cost efficiency, when a VNR experiences failure due to a fault in the physical infrastructure, its operation is restored through node/link migration without considering any backup resources. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed strategy effectively ensures the survivability of the VNRs, mitigates failures with our proposed failure recovery algorithms, and enhances the VNR acceptance rate.