Energy aware virtual network embedding with dynamic demands

In network virtualization, how to efficiently embed virtual networks with both node and link demands into a shared physical network, namely virtual network embedding, has attracted significant attention. Most of prior studies on this problem have the following two limitations: i) they assumed that the virtual network demands are constant values, which does not hold in real-world network since such demands may vary a lot over time; ii) their primary goal was to generate more revenues for the physical network, with no consideration of the energy cost, which has become a critical issue for the physical network. In this paper, we bridge the gap and study the energy aware virtual network embedding with dynamic demands. Specifically, we first model the dynamics of virtual network demands as a combination of following Gaussian distribution and exhibiting daily diurnal pattern. We then design an efficient heuristic algorithm by leveraging the dynamic characteristic of virtual network demands to minimize the energy consumption while keeping high revenue for the physical network. We implemented our algorithm in C++ and performed side-by-side comparison with prior algorithm. Extensive simulations show that our algorithm can significantly reduce the energy cost by up to 16% over the state-of-the-art algorithm, while maintaining near the same revenue.