Design and analysis of techniques for mapping virtual networks to software-defined network substrates

Software-defined networking has emerged as a powerful approach to improve the customizability and flexibility of networks. In this work, we focus on virtualization in the realm of software-defined networking, and study how to embed virtual networks in this environment. Virtual network embedding is an important problem because intelligent embedding can lead to better performance and a more efficient allocation of network resources compared to random mapping. In software-defined networking, the presence of a central controller is a complicating factor, and customizable routing and differences in resource sharing present new opportunities and challenges. We identify two aspects of virtual network embedding in software-defined networks: virtual node and link mapping, and controller placement. We tackle these problems together, developing techniques to perform embedding with two goals: balancing the load on the substrate network and minimizing controller-to-switch delays. We evaluate our techniques with simulation and Mininet emulation, and show that they are able to optimize for one of the above objectives while keeping the other within reasonable bounds.