Path protection with explicit availability constraints for virtual network embedding

Network reliability and survivability are important features for hosting high-demanding services in virtual network environments. Since multiple virtual networks can share the physical resources of the underlying substrate, even a single failure in the substrate can affect a large number of virtual networks and the services they offer. To overcome the physical link failure impact on virtual network operations, backup path mechanisms are investigated in many related works for path protection. However, this one to one path protection cannot handle explicit path availability requirements. In this work, we present a virtual network embedding algorithm which provides path protection with explicit virtual link availability constraints. Evaluation results show that our algorithm performs close to theoretical thresholds and consumes less link resources when delivering a virtual network embedding solution in polynomial time compared to a conventional path backup algorithm.