Resource-Efficiently Survivable IoT Services Provisioning via Virtual Network Embedding in Fiber-Wireless Access Network

Fiber-Wireless (FiWi) access network is a promising network architecture to provide the constantly available connections for the collaboration of objects in the Internet of Things (IoT). The network virtualization is dominating the evolution of FiWi, i.e., virtualized FiWi access network, which shields the difference between wireless and optical subnetworks and enables the customized transmission of different types of the IoT services in a common substrate network. However, the differences between optical and wireless subnetworks pose severe obstacle on their interoperability of resource allocation. In this paper, we focus on the survivable virtual network embedding (SVNE) in the FiWi access network for the purpose of the robust IoT service provisioning even in the scenario of network component failure. Each type of the IoT service is carried on one virtual network (VN), which is characterized by not only computing the resource and bandwidth resource demands but also the connection availability requirement. A connection availability model is proposed as an indicator of the network survivability and the IoT service robustness. We aim to allocate the resource for each VN with the resource cost minimized. The optimization problem of resource allocation is formulated in the integer linear programming (ILP) model that is solved for the optimal solution in a small-scale network. A heuristic algorithm is further put forward to facilitate the use of the proposed SVNE mechanism in a large-scale network. The simulation results verify that the proposed SVNE mechanism gains significant advantages in lower resource redundancy and higher acceptance ratio of VNs.