Local protection: A cost efficient technique for reliable virtual infrastructure design

Network virtualization allows multiple virtual infrastructures (VIs) to coexist on the same shared underlying substrate infrastructure, thus simplifying resource management, increasing infrastructure utilization and reducing operational costs. However, with this sharing a single server failure will affect all the VIs mapped on to it. Thus, backup resources should be reserved intelligently to provide cost effective VI reliability.In this paper, we study the reliable VI mapping over multiple clusters of servers that are geographically distributed and interconnected over a wide-area network. Since the bandwidth cost on the wide-area network is much higher than that in a cluster, we present the local protection based reliable VI mapping algorithm (LP-RVIM⁎) to minimize the total reliable mapping cost by only using backup VI nodes in the same cluster to protect the primary VI nodes. The LP-RVIM⁎ uses the additional backup cost metric to cost efficiently share backup VI nodes by primary VI nodes. Through detailed simulations we show that the LP-RVIM⁎ algorithm can reduce the VI mapping costs.