Noise-induced VNE method for software-defined infrastructure with uncertain delay behaviors

Software-defined infrastructure (SDI) provides virtualized infrastructures to customers by slicing computing resources and network resources. One of the important problems for deploying an SDI framework is to control the assignment of physical resources to a virtual network against changes of traffic demand and service demand. For this problem, the virtual network embedding (VNE) problem, which maps a virtual network to physical resources, has been addressed, but a centralized calculation was assumed. It is difficult to adopt the centralized approach as the size of infrastructure increases and the number of VN requests increases because the identification of current demand becomes more complicated. In this paper, we present a VNE method that works with limited information for large, complicated, and uncertain SDI frameworks. To achieve this, our method applies the biological “Yuragi” principle. Yuragi is a Japanese word whose English translation is “a small perturbation to the system.” Yuragi is a mechanism that provides adaptability of organisms and is often expressed as an attractor selection model. This paper develops a Yuragi-based VNE method that deals with node attributes, has the generality to handle a performance objective, and runs in multi-slice environments. Simulation results show that the Yuragi-based method decreases VN migrations by about 29% relative to a heuristic method to adapt to fluctuations in resource requirements.