Joint Allocation of Nodes and Links with Load Balancing in Network Virtualization

Network virtualization is seen as the fundamental underlying technology for enabling future Internet services. Mapping virtual networks onto a substrate network is a well-known NP-hard problem. Therefore, some authors propose heuristic based strategies by allocating virtual networks in two uncoordinated steps: mapping virtual nodes and virtual links separately. However, this strategy could result in poor performance. In this work, we propose an algorithm for the joint allocation of virtual nodes and links with the focus on balancing the load in the substrate resources. Such an algorithm is designed to cope with capacity constraints and network delay, it also offers an abstraction to consider functional requirements like geographical location or hardware characteristics. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has similar or better performance than other coordinated strategies from the Literature, while requiring a considerably lower processing time, finding solutions up to 269 times faster than others solutions.