Virtual Network Resource Allocation Considering Dependability Issues

Virtualized Networks (VN) has been pointed by the scientific community as a promising way to solve the current ossification problem of the Internet, since several heterogeneous VN can coexist on a shared physical infrastructure. An important issue for VN allocation algorithms is related to dependability, since components of the physical network are failure-prone (issue not considered by several techniques). This paper proposes a GRASP (Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure) based algorithm for allocating virtualized networks taking into account dependability issues. Dependability metrics are estimated using stochastic Petri nets and reliability block diagrams, as well as redundancy techniques are adopted for improving such metrics. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach when dependability issues are taken into account.