It's About Time: On Optimal Virtual Network Embeddings under Temporal Flexibilities

Distributed applications often require high-performance networks with strict connectivity guarantees. For instance, many cloud applications suffer from today's variations of the intra-cloud bandwidth, which leads to poor and unpredictable application performance. Accordingly, we witness a trend towards virtual networks (VNets) which can provide resource isolation. Interestingly, while the problem of where to embed a VNet is fairly well-understood today, much less is known about when to optimally allocate a VNet. This however is important, as the requirements specified for a VNet do not have to be static, but can vary over time and even include certain temporal flexibilities. This paper initiates the study of the temporal VNet embedding problem (TVNEP). We propose a continuous-time mathematical programming approach to solve the TVNEP, and present and compare different algorithms. Based on these insights, we present the CSM-Model which incorporates both symmetry and state-space reductions to significantly speed up the process of computing exact solutions to the TVNEP. Based on the CSM-Model, we derive a greedy algorithm OGA to compute fast approximate solutions. In an extensive computational evaluation, we show that despite the hardness of the TVNEP, the CSM-Model is sufficiently powerful to solve moderately sized instances to optimality within one hour and under different objective functions (such as maximizing the number of embeddable VNets). We also show that the greedy algorithm exploits flexibilities well and yields good solutions. More generally, our results suggest that already little time flexibilities can improve the overall system performance significantly.