Towards survivable network virtualization

Network virtualization decouples the traditional Internet Service Provider (ISP) into the infrastructure provider (InP) and the service provider (SP). Disruptive technologies hence can be easily employed by the SP and transparently mapped to the physical network managed by the InP after resolving the network embedding problem. In this work, we investigate the survivable network embedding (SNE) problem. We transform the SNE problem into a multi-commodity network flow problem, and present an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model to achieve joint optimal resources allocation for both the working and backup demands. For large-scale problems, we propose an efficient algorithm based on the tabu-search meta-heuristic, which is shown to be close to the optimal results from the ILP.