A Cost Sensitive Approach for Virtual Network Reconfiguration

Network Virtualization paves the way for sharing the physical infrastructure with many service providers and enables resources in physical substrate network being applied and provisioned as a form of Virtual Network(VN). However, there exist many obstacles in applications of this technology. The problem of VN embedding is commonly considered the most difficult one of them. Most existing research only considers the case of how to embed VN request. Provided user demands on Virtual Network are dynamically changing, how to efficiently reconfigure VN to adapt to changing demand is challenging also. In this paper, our objective is to find way for optimally reorganize VN that already embedded on VN in a cost sensitive way to meet the changed demand. We address this problem by proposing a cost sensitive VN reconfiguration approach. A heuristic VN reconfiguration algorithm with virtual node and virtual link migration and swapping strategy is designed. We validate and evaluate the given algorithms by conducting experiments in high fidelity emulation environment. Our evaluation results show that the proposed approach can effectively reconfigure VN while minimizing cost and fragmentation of resource. By comparing our algorithms with others, the given reconfiguration algorithm outperforms existing solutions.