Dedicated Protection for Survivable Virtual Network Embedding

Network virtualization is enabling infrastructure providers (InPs) to offer new services to service providers (SPs). InPs are usually bound by service level agreements to ensure various levels of resource availability for different SPs' virtual networks (VNs). They provision redundant backup resources while embedding an SP's VN request to conform to the SLAs during physical failures in the infrastructure. An extreme backup resource provisioning is to reserve a mutually exclusive backup of each element in an SP's VN request. Such dedicated protection scheme can enable an InP to ensure fast VN recovery, thus, providing high uptime guarantee to the SPs. In this paper, we study the 1 + 1-Protected Virtual Network Embedding (1 + 1-ProViNE) problem. We propose Dedicated Protection for Virtual Network Embedding (DRONE), a suite of solutions to the 1 + 1-ProViNE problem. DRONE includes an integer linear programming formulation for optimal solution (OPT-DRONE) and a heuristic (FAST-DRONE) to tackle the computational complexity of the optimal solution. Trace driven simulations show that FAST-DRONE allocates only 14.3% extra backup resources on average compared to the optimal solution, while executing 200-1200 times faster. Simulation results also show that FAST-DRONE can accept four times more VN requests on average compared to the state-of-the-art solution for providing dedicated protection to VNs.