Research on Heterogeneous-backup Virtual Network Embedding

The failure of a single physical server will cause a bad impact on the performance of the virtual networks in the cloud computing and data center environments. The existing approaches that provision redundant and backup physical resources are able to reduce the impact due to failure of physical devices, however, they do not pay attention to homogeneous issues of the physical servers. Thus, a heterogeneous-backup virtual network embedding method is proposed. Firstly, the redundant and backup physical resources are only provided to critical virtual machines so that the method can save the overhead of backup resources. Then, in order to improve resilience of the virtual networks, substrate nodes corresponding to the primary and backup embedding of each virtual machine must be heterogeneous. Finally, the total cost of provisioning bandwidth on the substrate links for the total virtual network is minimized as the objective function to further save the overhead of backup resources. Simulation experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to significantly improve resilience of the virtual networks on the premise of guaranteeing the performance of virtual networks embedding.