Coding-aware virtual network mapping for surviving single link failure

With network virtualization more and more popular, how to protect the virtual networks (VNs) from a single substrate link failure is increasingly important. Existing protection schemes like dedicated backup and shared backup, suffer from high resource cost and delayed recovery, respectively. To offer instantaneous recovery with less redundant resource, in this paper, we propose a coding-aware VN mapping framework which applies network coding on the VN protection for the first time. This algorithm framework includes two network coding mechanisms with their corresponding link mapping algorithms. The simple coding mechanism is resource-efficient and suitable for high nodal degree network. The general coding mechanism relaxes two restrictions in simple coding, and is so flexible to make more VNs be mapped successfully. The simulation experiments show that our proposed algorithms can significantly improve the request acceptance ratio and revenue to cost ratio, while reducing the backup bandwidth gain of VNs.