Multi-domain virtual network embedding with coordinated link mapping

Network Virtualization, which allows the coexistence of various logical networks on shared physical infrastructure, has become popular in recent years. The optimal mapping of virtual resource to physical resource is a major issue in network virtualization. This problem, called virtual network embedding (VNE), has been well explored in the context of one physical domain, which is in practice operated by a single infrastructure provider (InP). However, the needs of virtual network (VN) is rapidly growing, and quite a number of VNs have to be established across multi-domain. For multi-domain VNE, infrastructure providers can no longer just solve their own single domain VNE problem, but have to cooperate to build the whole VN. Therefore, new challenge arises for the multi-domain VNE, compared to traditional single domain VNE. The existing investigations on this problem mainly focus on decomposing a VN to sub VN for each domain, but little attention has been paid to the joint relation between intra-domain and inter-domain (peering) links. In this paper, we propose a multi-domain link mapping method which combines the intra and peering link mapping so as to optimize the overall resource utilization. Our approach is easy to be deployed since it is based on current Internet architecture. Evaluation shows that our approach brings improvements related to existing methods.