Design of reliable virtual infrastructure using local protection

Network virtualization technology wherein multiple virtual infrastructures (VIs) are supported on the same underlying infrastructure is the key enabler of the cloud computing paradigm. However, due to the resource sharing, even a single server failure in the substrate will affect all the VIs mapped on to it. Thus, backup resources should be reserved intelligently to provide cost-effective VI reliability. In this paper, we study the problem of reliable VI mapping over multiple clusters. We propose a local protection scheme to minimize the total reliable mapping cost, i.e., each VI node is protected in a local cluster so that the high backup bandwidth cost on the wide-area network can be avoided. We present our local protection based reliable VI mapping algorithm (LP-RVIM) to minimize the mapping cost for VIs with protection. Through simulations we show that our LP-RVIM algorithm can efficiently reduce the mapping costs when compared to other VI mapping algorithms.