Virtual network mapping for multicast services with max-min fairness of reliability

Network function virtualization (NFV) provides an effective way to reduce the network provider's cost by allowing multiple virtual networks (VNs) to share the underlying physical infrastructure. In the NFV environment, especially when supporting multicast services over the VNs, reliability is a critical requirement since the failure of one virtual node can cause the malfunction of multiple nodes that receive multicasting data from it. In this paper, we study for the first time to the best of our knowledge how to efficiently map VNs for multicast services over both general IP networks and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based elastic optical networks (EONs) while taking into consideration the max-min fairness in terms of reliability among distinct VNs. For general IP networks, we propose a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model to determine the upper bound on the reliability with max-min fairness. In addition, an efficient heuristic, namely a reliability-aware genetic (RAG) algorithm, is developed to address reliable multicast VN mapping with a low computational complexity. By encoding multicast tree construction and link mapping into the process of path selection, taking into consideration the reliability with max-min fairness, and the networking reliability factors during mutation, RAG can globally optimize the reliability and fairness of all the multicast VN requests. For OFDM-based EONs, we extend the MILP (RAG) to optical-MILP [(O-MILP) optical RAG (O-RAG)] by considering the most efficient modulation format selection strategy, spectrum continuity, and conflict constraints. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that RAG (O-RAG) achieves close to the optimal reliability fairness with a much lower time complexity than the MILP (O-MILP) model. In particular, the path reliability-based mutation strategy in RAG (O-RAG) yields a significant performance improvement over other heuristic solutions in terms of reliability fairness, bandwidth (spectrum) consumption, and transmission delay.