Distance-Based Virtual Network Embedding to Achieve Resilient Cooperative IoT Services

Abstract

Various IoT (Internet of Things) services are provided on multiple virtual networks embedded into a common substrate network. Each IoT service provider may wish to cooperate with other IoT service providers and request cooperative VNE (Virtual Network Embedding) to the substrate network operator. The substrate network operator provides multiple protected shared substrate nodes to assist the service providers to achieve resilient cooperative IoT services. In cooperative VNE, multiple cooperating virtual nodes specified by the service providers must be mapped to the shared substrate nodes. This paper formulates the cooperative VNE problem and proposes a distance-based VNE method to solve the problem efficiently. The proposed VNE method can perform virtual node mapping precisely on the basis of the mapping results of multiple cooperating virtual nodes to the shared substrate nodes. The proposed method can balance the utilization of substrate resources by exploiting the modified distances on the virtual network and substrate network. Simulation results reveal that the proposed method can reduce the total amount of substrate resources required for cooperative VNE in cases of unrestricted substrate resources and achieve a high success rate for cooperative VNE under the condition where substrate resources are restricted.