Mobility aware virtual network embedding

Over the last years, network virtualization has become one of the most promising solutions for sustainability towards the ongoing increase of data demand in mobile networks. The problem of efficiently forming a virtual network has been studied extensively during the past years and many different solutions have been proposed but these studies have mainly focused on wired networks. The main purpose of this paper is to provide an optimization framework for optimal virtual network embedding by explicitly considering the effect of the actual user mobility, assuming a Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) scheme. In addition, service differentiation is introduced, giving higher priority to time-critical over-the-top (OTT) services compared to elastic Internet applications. The performance of the proposed framework is compared to greedy heuristics algorithms that are mobility agnostic and numerical investigations reveal that the effect of mobility has an important role to play in the design of virtual networks. Additionally, the mobility aware scheme can provide tangible gains in the overall performance compared with the previous proposed schemes that do not take into account the effect of user mobility.