Distributed Reallocation Scheme for Virtual Network Resources

Abstract

Network virtualization is an emerging technology for cost-effective sharing of network resources. The key strategy in network virtualization is of slicing physical resources (links, CPU, memory, and storage) to create virtual networks that are assigned to different operators. One important challenge on network virtualization is the efficient use of the physical resources. To accomplish such efficient use the management of the physical resources should be transparent to the applications running within the virtual networks, and should be executed at runtime in order to deal with the variation on the load requests of different virtual networks. Traditional resource allocation schemes use offline, centralized, and global view strategies to manage the use of physical resources. In contrast to these strategies, we propose a runtime, distributed, local view approach to manage physical resources. In this paper we introduce a virtual network architecture and an associated self-organizing algorithm to reallocate virtual network resources along different physical nodes in order to equalize the bandwidth, and storage consumption on the physical nodes. We developed a virtual network model based on Omnet++ to simulate the designed self-organizing algorithm. An IPTV testbed scenario is presented and initial experiments, about the interruption time of the application inside the IPTV virtual network, are described.