On the Benefit of Virtualization: Strategies for Flexible Server Allocation

Virtualization technology facilitates a dynamic, demand-driven allocation and migration of servers. This paper studies how the flexibility offered by network virtualization can be used to improve Quality-of-Service parameters such as latency, while taking into account allocation costs. A generic use case is considered where both the overall demand issued for a certain service (for example, an SAP application in the cloud, or a gaming application) as well as the origins of the requests change over time (e.g., due to time zone effects or due to user mobility), and we present online and optimal offline strategies to compute the number and location of the servers implementing this service. These algorithms also allow us to study the fundamental benefits of dynamic resource allocation compared to static systems. Our simulation results confirm our expectations that the gain of flexible server allocation is particularly high in scenarios with moderate dynamics

Embedding of Virtual Network Requests over Static Wireless Multihop Networks

Network virtualization is a technology of running multiple heterogeneous network architecture on a shared substrate network. One of the crucial components in network virtualization is virtual network embedding, which provides a way to allocate physical network resources (CPU and link bandwidth) to virtual network requests. Despite significant research efforts on virtual network embedding in wired and cellular networks, little attention has been paid to that in wireless multi-hop networks, which is becoming more important due to its rapid growth and the need to share these networks among different business sectors and users. In this paper, we first study the root causes of new challenges of virtual network embedding in wireless multi-hop networks, and propose a new embedding algorithm that efficiently uses the resources of the physical substrate network. We examine our algorithm's performance through extensive simulations under various scenarios. Due to lack of competitive algorithms, we compare the proposed algorithm to five other algorithms, mainly borrowed from wired embedding or artificially made by us, partially with or without the key algorithmic ideas to assess their impacts.Comment: 22 page

On distributed virtual network embedding with guarantees

To provide wide-area network services, resources from different infrastructure providers are needed. Leveraging the consensus-based resource allocation literature, we propose a general distributed auction mechanism for the (NP-hard) virtual network (VNET) embedding problem. Under reasonable assumptions on the bidding scheme, the proposed mechanism is proven to converge, and it is shown that the solutions guarantee a worst-case efficiency of (1-(1/e)) relative to the optimal node embedding, or VNET embedding if virtual links are mapped to exactly one physical link. This bound is optimal, that is, no better polynomial-time approximation algorithm exists, unless P=NP. Using extensive simulations, we confirm superior convergence properties and resource utilization when compared to existing distributed VNET embedding solutions, and we show how by appropriate policy design, our mechanism can be instantiated to accommodate the embedding goals of different service and infrastructure providers, resulting in an attractive and flexible resource allocation solution.CNS-0963974 - National Science Foundationhttp://www.cs.bu.edu/fac/matta/Papers/ToN-CAD.pdfAccepted manuscrip