Energy-aware virtual network embedding through consolidation

The rising cost of electricity has forced business organizations to find new ways to cut energy spending. This paper studies how to reduce energy consumption in virtual network embedding, which embeds virtual networks (VNs) requested by users to a shared substrate network (SN) run by an infrastructure provider (InP). Previous research has primarily focused on finding embedding methods to increase revenues by accommodating more VN requests in a fixed SN, with little attention to reducing the energy cost. To fill this gap we formulate an energy consumption model and devise an efficient energy-aware VN embedding algorithm using a consolidation technique. Through preliminary simulations we show that our algorithm can significantly reduce energy consumption by up to 30% over the existing energy-oblivious algorithm, while obtaining attractive revenues for the InPs.