Multi-Provider Virtual Network Embedding With Limited Information Disclosure

Abstract

The ever-increasing need to diversify the Internet has recently revived the interest in network virtualization. Wide-area virtual network (VN) deployment raises the need for VN embedding (VNE) across multiple Infrastructure Providers (InPs), due to the InP's limited geographic footprint. Multi-provider VNE, in turn, requires a layer of indirection, interposed between the Service Providers and the InPs. Such brokers, usually known as VN Providers, are expected to have very limited knowledge of the physical infrastructure, since InPs will not be willing to disclose detailed information about their network topology and resource availability to third parties. Such information disclosure policies entail significant implications on resource discovery and allocation. In this paper, we study the challenging problem of multi-provider VNE with limited information disclosure (LID). In this context, we initially investigate the visibility of VN Providers on substrate network resources and question the suitability of topology-based requests for VNE. Subsequently, we present linear programming formulations for: (i) the partitioning of traffic matrix based VN requests into segments mappable to InPs, and (ii) the mapping of VN segments into substrate network topologies. VN request partitioning is carried out under LID, i.e., VN Providers access only information which is not deemed confidential by InPs. We further investigate the suboptimality of LID on VNE against a best-case scenario where the complete network topology and resource availability information is available to VN Providers. © 2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.