Opportunistic provisioning for multicast virtual network requests

In this paper, we investigate the problem of online multicast virtual network embedding (MVNE) by introducing the strategies of waiting-tolerant and load-prediction into our VN provisioning framework for reducing the blocking ratio. We propose a heuristic algorithm called MVNE-WL (MVN Embedding with the strategies of Waiting-tolerant and Load-prediction) for solving this problem efficiently. The numerical results obtained from extensive simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach and show that MVNE-WL is better than traditional solutions in terms of the MVN mapping blocking ratio, the total net revenue, the unit cost efficiency, the node utilization and the link utilization in the long term.