Virtual network embedding in wireless mesh networks through reconfiguration of channels

Network virtualization is gaining a lot of interest from the research community thanks to its ability to support new networking paradigms and experimental scenarios. Virtual network embedding (VNE) is a key step for enabling network virtualization and its efficiency allows to maximize the profits of the physical network (also called substrate network) provider. In this paper we focus on the cases where the substrate network consists of a multi-radio IEEE 802.11 wireless mesh network. In such kind of network, bandwidth of a wireless link depends on the rate used to transmit but also on the number of wireless links that use the same channel, because of interference. Exploiting such a property, we propose a heuristic for the online, i.e. requests are not known in advance, VNE problem that is able to increase the profit of the substrate network provider by fictitiously augmenting the network resources and then reconfiguring the channels to avoid congestion.