Survivable Virtual Network Design and Embedding to Survive a Facility Node Failure

Abstract

As virtualization is becoming a promising way to support various emerging application, provisioning survivability to requested virtual networks (VN) in a resource efficient way is important. In this paper, we investigate the survivable VN embedding (SVNE) problem from a new perspective. First, we consider the failure dependent protection (FDP) in which each primary facility node would have a different backup facility node, as opposed to the Failure Independent Protection (FIP) which has been studied before, in order to provide the same degree of protection against a single node failure with less substrate resources. Secondly, we enhance the VN with additional computing and communication resources and design the Enhanced VN (or EVN) before embedding it to the substrate in order to further reduce the amount of substrate resources needed to survive a single facility node failure. The work is the first that combines the FDP with EVN design (FD-EVN) to explore a resource efficient solution to the SVNE problem. After presenting a binary quadratic programming (BQP) formulation of the FD-EVN design problem and a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) formulation of the EVN embedding (EVNE) problem, we propose two heuristic algorithms for FD-EVN design, as well as an EVNE algorithm that explores primary and backup substrate resources sharing. Simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the solutions to the BQP/MILP formulation when possible, and the heuristics. The proposed FD-EVN approach has shown to be resource efficient and in particular, outperform other approaches in terms of request acceptance ratio and embedding cost, although as a tradeoff, requiring more service migration after failures.