Virtual Network Allocation for Fault Tolerance with Bandwidth Efficiency in a Multi-tenant Data Center

In a multitenant data center, nodes and links of tenants´ virtual networks (VNs) share a single component of the physical substrate network (SN). A failure of the single SN component can thereby cause simultaneous failures of multiple nodes and links in a VN, this complex of failures must significantly disrupt the services offered on the VN. In the present paper, we clarify how the fault tolerance of a VN is affected by a SN failure, especially from the perspective of VN allocation in the SN. We propose a VN allocation model for multitenant data centers and formulate a problem that deals with the bandwidth loss in the VN due the SN failure. We conduct numerical simulations with the setting that has 1.7 × 10⁸ bit/s bandwidth demand on each VN. The results show that the bandwidth loss can be reduced to 5.3 × 10² bit/s per VN, but the required bandwidth between physical servers in the SN increases to 1.0 × 10⁹ bit/s per VN when each node in the VN is mapped to an individual physical server. The balance between the bandwidth loss and the required bandwidth between physical servers can be optimized by assigning every four nodes of the VN to each physical server, meaning that we minimize the bandwidth loss without providing too sufficient bandwidth in the core area of the SN.