Graph Convolutional Network Aided Virtual Network Embedding for Internet of Thing

Abstract

The past few years have seen the dramatic adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) in everyday life, from manufacturing to healthcare. With the emergence of various new Internet of Things applications, it is a challenging problem to meet the different QoS requirements of Internet of Things applications in shared substrate networks. Recently, Network Virtualization (NV) has attracted a large amount of attention from academia and industry. NV enables multiple virtual networks to coexist on the same substrate network, thus providing IoT users with customized end-to-end services. The main challenge of NV is the Virtual Network Embedding (VNE) problem, which refers to embed different virtual networks into one substrate network. Inspired by the recent success of graph convolutional network (GCN) in graph structured data processing, in this paper, we propose a GCN aided VNE algorithm. The GCN can extract high-order spatial structure information among substrate nodes through the convolution kernel. Considering that the training data of VNE has no label, we introduce the policy gradient algorithm to optimize the GCN model. In addition, three evaluation metrics are designed to evaluate the performance of the network embedding policy. Some simulations are implemented to evaluate our proposed algorithm in comparison to the other state-of-the-art solutions.