Providing survivability for virtual networks against substrate network failure

Network virtualization has been regarded as a core attribute of the Future Internet. In a network virtualization environment (NVE), multiple heterogeneous virtual networks can coexist on a shared substrate network. Thus, a substrate network failure may affect multiple virtual networks. In this case, it is increasingly critical to provide survivability for the virtual networks against the substrate network failures. Previous research focused on mechanisms that ensure the resilience of the virtual network. However, the resource efficiency is still important to make the mapping scheme practical. In this paper, we study the survivable virtual network embedding mechanisms against substrate link and node failure from the perspective of improving the resource efficiency. For substrate link survivability, we propose a load-balancing and re-configuration strategy to improve the acceptance ratio and bandwidth utilization ratio. For substrate node survivability, we develop a minimum cost heuristic based on a divided network model and a backup resource cost model, which can both satisfy the location constraints of virtual node and increase the sharing degree of the backup resources. Simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the solutions. The proposed load balancing and re-configuration strategy for substrate link survivability outperforms other approaches in terms of acceptance ratio and bandwidth utilization ratio. And the proposed minimum cost heuristic for substrate node survivability gets a good performance in term of acceptance ratio.