A load-balancing-based fault-tolerant mapping method in smart grid virtual networks

Abstract

To satisfy the QoS requirements and improve the reliability of the network, we propose a load-balancing-based fault-tolerant mapping method (LFMM) in smart grid virtual networks. The process of LFMM is divided into two stages, one is node mapping stage, and the other is link mapping stage. During node mapping stage, we present a load-balancing-based virtual node mapping (LVNM) algorithm. We choose the nodes with minimum load ratio in virtual network providing layer to map, in order to avoid the appearance of “bottleneck node”. During link mapping stage, we design a genetic-algorithm-based fault-tolerant virtual link mapping (GFVLM) algorithm to ensure the fault tolerance and reliability of the network. By this method, we select two disjoint links for each request including a primary link and a backup link. The evaluation results show that our proposed method can balance network load, have better fault tolerance ability and improve the reliability of smart grid communication networks.