Joint Node-Link Algorithm for Embedding Virtual Networks with Conciliation Strategy

Network virtualization (NV) has widely envisioned as a crucial factor for the success of the future networks by enabling a flexible, cost-effective and on-demand deployments of multiple network service requests on a shared physical infrastructure. The major challenge of NV is to efficiently and effectively embed heterogeneous virtual network requests (VNRs), consisting of a set of virtual nodes connected by virtual links, onto a shared substrate network meeting various stringent resource constraints. Most of the research papers in this field have merely focused on separate virtual node mapping (VNoM) or virtual link mapping (VLiM) with scalable heuristic algorithms. The lack of a coordination between node and link mapping stages results in low acceptance ratio as well as network revenues. In this paper, we propose a new approach based on Genetic Algorithm (GA) that jointly coordinates node and link mappings where the link mapping is relied on a path ranking method. A novel heuristic conciliation mechanism is introduced to handle a possible set of infeasible link mappings during generating virtual embedding solutions in GA's operations. Extensive evaluation results show that our proposed GA-based algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art virtual embedding algorithms in all performance metrics we adopted.