Virtual network embedding with substrate support for parallelization

Network virtualization has been the focus of intense research interest and is a promising approach to overcome the ossification of the Internet. A major challenge with network virtualization is virtual network embedding, which deals with the efficient embedding of virtual networks with resource constraints into a substrate network. Many research results have been reported regarding this problem. However, there hasn't been any focus on virtual network embedding with substrate support for parallelization, i.e., the substrate network supports parallel computation and allows a virtual node to be mapped into multiple substrate nodes. This paper is the first attempt at gaining a better understanding on how parallelization benefits embedding. We present a formal problem description and propose two algorithms that capitalize parallelism. Several extensions are developed to complement the proposed algorithms. From experimental results, the effectiveness and usefulness of the algorithms and extensions are confirmed.