Efficient Provisioning of Hybrid Virtual Network with Stochastic Resource Demands

Network virtualization is a key technology to support multiple heterogeneous virtual networks (VNs) on a shared substrate infrastructure. Most current research on designing VNs and VN mapping is either efficient for unicast service-oriented VNs with static or dynamic resource demand, or suitable for mapping multicast VNs (MVNs) with deterministic network resource requirement. In this paper, we investigate the online mapping for stochastic hybrid VN (M-SHVN) requests in cloud-based data centres, where the requests consist of both multicast and unicast VN requests. We assume that the bandwidth demand [GRAPHICS] of the hybrid virtual network (HVN) request follows a normal distribution, i.e. [GRAPHICS] . We devise a heuristic algorithm M-SHVN for tackling this NP-hard problem efficiently. The numerical results obtained from our extensive simulation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach compared with the traditional "over-provisioning" solutions.