Pricing Utility-Based Virtual Networks

This paper presents a new pricing mechanism for virtual network (VN) services to regulate the demand for their shared substrate network (SN) resources. The contributions of this article are two-fold; first, we introduce a new time-of-use pricing policy for the SN resources that reflects the effect of resource congestion introduced by VN users. The preferences of the VN users are first represented through corresponding demand-utility functions that quantify the sensitivity of the applications hosted by the VNs to resource consumption, time-of-use and prices during peak-demand periods. We then introduce a novel model of time-varying VNs, where users are allowed to up- or down-scale the requested resources to continuously maximize their utility while minimizing the cost of embedding the VNs onto the SN. The second contribution is a novel hierarchical embedding management approach tailored to efficiently map these dynamic VNs. The proposed VN embedding scheme recasts the VN embedding problem as a subgraph matching one, and introduces a simple heuristics-based matching procedure to find a good VN embedding from a number of candidate solutions obtained in parallel. In contrast to existing solutions, the proposed scheme does not impose any limitations on the size or topology of the VN requests. Instead, the search is customized according to the VN size and the associated utility. Experimental results demonstrate the performance achieved by the proposed work in terms of the increased profit, resource utilization and number of accepted requests.