Study of Reconfiguration Cost and Energy Aware VNE Policies in Cycle-Stationary Traffic Scenarios

Network virtualization techniques allow for the coexistence of many virtual networks hosted in the same substrate network. Virtual router migration allows for resource consolidation with the consequence to reduce the power consumption in low traffic periods. Unfortunately, virtual router migration has the effect of degrading the quality of service during the downtime in which the router is not able to carry on its forwarding function. For this reason, despite the advantages in power consumption saving, the migration technique should be applied with parsimony to avoid an excessive QoS degradation. The objective of this paper is to study virtual network embedding (VNE) problems aware of both operation and reconfiguration costs that are characterized by the energy consumption and the revenue loss due to QoS degradation. Both embedding optimization problem formulation and feasible solutions to the problem in cycle-stationary traffic scenario and when the possible embeddings are determined a priori will be given. Two migration policies will be introduced and compared. The first one, referred to as “global,” is based on the knowledge of the entire daily traffic profile and it is determined by solving a Markov decision process. The second one, referred to as “local,” is only based on the knowledge of the current traffic. The results achieved show how the application of the global policy allows better performance than the local one and its application can lead to a cost reduction in the order of 35% with respect to traditional migration policies.