As the interest on Network Virtualization continues
to grow, so does the awareness of the many technical obstacles to
transpose before the envisioned virtualized network environment
may become a reality. A significant obstacle lies on the efficient
assignment of virtual resources into physical ones. Performing the
so-called mapping of a virtual network into a substrate network
is a computationally intensive task, due to the dual optimization
required for nodes and links placement.
The purpose of this paper is to tackle this problem taking into
consideration real-life scenarios of network operators, where
the limitations imposed by the heterogeneity of the virtual and
substrate networks must be accounted for. To that end, this paper
proposes a heuristic algorithm for virtual resources mapping in
the physical infrastructure that supports the heterogeneity of
networks, in both links and nodes. The mapping heuristic was
evaluated both through simulation and in a real experimental
virtualization platform. Through the simulation results, it is
shown that the mapping approach is able to embed a high
percentage of the Virtual Network (VNet) requests respecting
all links and node constraints. With respect to the experimental
results, the proposed algorithm was shown to be fast, requiring a
mapping time in the order of low tens of milliseconds, and linearly
scalable with the increase in the number of existing VNets