Achieving effective resilience for QoS-aware application mapping

Overlay mapping provides a flexible and effective means of application deployment by selecting a subset of nodes and links from the substrate-hosting network to meet, or even enhance, the requirements of the application. In order to take full advantage of the potential of overlay mapping given the features of the substrate network, such as topology and performance characteristics, it is critical to carefully choose the subset of hosting nodes. This is to balance the effectiveness of the overlay mapping with substrate network constraints and resource usage. In this paper, we investigate how to provide effective resilience for a QoS-aware overlay mapping so as to make the mapped applications resilient against substrate network failure(s) whilst providing enhanced QoS. We first formulate the problem as an Integer Linear Program (ILP). Using simulations with small networks, existing methods are shown to be capable of achieving enhanced QoS but lack effective resilience when compared against the optimal ILP solution. To address this issue, a novel heuristic is proposed which incorporates substrate topology information. Through simulations with synthetic and real networks, the effectiveness of the new heuristic is confirmed.