Virtual network mapping considering energy consumption and availability

Network virtualization is widely considered as a mainstay for overcoming the Internet’s ossification problem, and virtual network embedding (VNE) is a critical issue. Over recent years, growing energy costs and increased ecological awareness have stimulated the interest in reducing energy consumption by Internet service providers (ISP). Dependability is also an important requirement, as it involves metrics such as reliability and availability, which directly impact quality of service (QoS). Prior works on virtual network embedding have focused mainly on maximizing revenue for Internet service providers (ISPs), and they did not consider energy consumption and dependability metrics jointly in the mapping. This paper presents an energy-efficient mapping of dependable virtual networks. The approach considers a problem formulation that concomitantly takes into account energy consumption and availability constraints for virtual network embedding problem, and an algorithm based on Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) metaheuristic is adopted. The algorithm utilizes a sensitivity analysis based on availability importance to achieve the QoS required by each virtual network, and models based on reliability block diagrams (RBD) and stochastic Petri nets (SPN) are utilized to estimate availability. Results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach, and they show the trade-off between availability, energy consumption, cost and revenue.