Shared Backup Network Provision for Virtual Network Embedding

Network virtualization has been recognized as a promising solution to enable the rapid deployment of customized services by building multiple Virtual Networks (VNs) on a shared substrate network. Whereas various VN embedding schemes have been proposed to allocate substrate resources to VN requests, little work has been done to provide backup mechanisms in case of substrate network failures. In a virtualized infrastructure, a single substrate failure will affect all the VNs sharing that resource. Provisioning a dedicated backup network for each VN is not efficient in terms of substrate resource utilization. In this paper, we investigate the problem of shared backup network provision for VN embedding and propose two schemes: shared on-demand and shared pre-allocation backup schemes. Simulation experiments show that both proposed schemes make better utilization of substrate resources than the dedicated backup scheme without sharing, while each has its own advantages.