Virtual Network Embedding in Fiber-Wireless Access Networks for Resource-Efficient IoT Service Provisioning

The rise of Industry 4.0 is pushing more machine devices into the connection of the communication network. Internet of Things (IoT) emerges as an enabling technique to support automatic information transmission and the universal interconnection among massive machine devices. Unlike the human type communication (HTC) in the conventional Internet, IoT features machine type communication (HTC) with small data granularity and massive connections, which impose new challenges on the network resource allocation earlier designed for HTC communication. One of the challenging issues is how we can manage the network resource for the IoT service provisioning. As a promising network architecture for the “last-mile” access in 5G communication, Fiber-Wireless (FiWi) access network compromises the high bandwidth capacity of the optical access network and the flexibility of wireless access network. Especially, network virtualization as an emerging technique provides FiWi with the feasibility for the coordinated bandwidth allocation of wireless access network and optical access network. The evolution of FiWi access network should be not only oriented to the technological breakthrough in regular traffic, but also be supportive of the emerging IoT traffic. In this paper, we focus on the resource allocation problem in FiWi access network supporting IoT service. We first analyze the dynamics of regular traffic and propose the traffic prediction method based on Q-Learning. Then, we propose a virtual network embedding algorithm to map exactly the virtual networks of IoT traffic to the idle resource of the virtual networks of regular traffic without degrading the performance of regular traffic. Thus, the proposed algorithm can improve the resource utilization more effectively. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve a higher acceptance ratio and lower migration ratio of IoT traffic.