An Approach for Reducing Energy Consumption in Dependable Virtual Network Embedding

Network virtualization has been considered as a mainstay for the success of overcoming the Internet's ossification problem, as it provides many advantages including scalability, traffic isolation, infrastructure abstraction and the promise of efficient use of network resources. Over recent years, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have been particularly interested in reducing energy consumption in their infrastructures due to growing energy costs and increased ecological awareness. In this paper, we propose a metaheuristic-based approach to virtual network embedding (VNE) considering dependability constraints, in which energy savings are introduced by reducing the number of activated nodes and links. Results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms perform better than other important approaches for the adopted scenarios. Also, the results present the trade-off between availability, energy consumption and cost.