Energy efficient virtual network embedding for wireless multi-hop cellular networks using multi-commodity flow algorithm

Abstract

With the rapid development of wireless mobile communication technologies, the trend of generalisation and centralisation requires variable communication devices and flexible network structures. To improve the transmission quality and extend the cell coverage, multi-hop relay network, as a wireless access network, has become an important part of communication system framework. Furthermore, to support seamless communication of multiple devices and services in heterogenous wireless networks with high resources utilisation, network virtualisation has been proposed to offer a flexible and scalable management. In this paper, we study the wireless multi-hop cellular network and the problem of virtual network embedding. We first analyse the wireless multi-hop cellular network scenario and establish a virtual network embedding model. After that we propose a minimum cost flow algorithm based on the multi-commodity flow algorithm. Thus the problem is transformed into a multi-commodity flow problem. We finally put forward an optimisation algorithm of Lagrange relaxation and sub-gradient algorithm to solve the problem. The simulation results show that the proposed multi-commodity flow algorithm can make full use of network resources, and improve the acceptance rate of virtual network requests, so as to improve the quality of service.