ReNoVatE: Recovery from node failure in virtual network embedding

Abstract

Network virtualization (NV) has evolved as a key enabling technology for offering the next generation network services. Recently, it is being rolled out in data center networks as a means to provide bandwidth guarantees to cloud applications. With increasing deployments of virtual networks (VNs) in commercial-grade networks with commodity hardware, VNs need to tackle failures in the underlying substrate network. In this paper, we study the problem of recovering a batch of VNs affected by a substrate node failure. The combinatorial possibilities of alternate embeddings of the failed virtual nodes and links of the VNs makes the task of finding the most efficient recovery both non-trivial and intractable. Furthermore, any recovery approach ideally should not cause any service disruption for the unaffected parts of the VNs. We take into account these issues to design a recovery approach for maximizing recovery and minimizing the cost of recovery and network disruption. We provide an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation of our recovery scheme. We also propose a fast and scalable heuristic algorithm to tackle the computational complexity of the ILP solution. Evaluation results demonstrate that our heuristic performs close to the optimal solution and outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithm.