Online assignment of non-SDN virtual network nodes to a physical SDN

Network virtualization is a promising solution to increase utilization of communication resources in data center networks. On the other side, software defined networks (SDNs) gather great attention from industry and academia to be used as the networking solution for data centers. Virtualizing SDNs and providing suitable virtual network embedding (VNE) techniques, paves the path for designing highly configurable virtualized cloud data centers. Considering the challenges which are arisen by using the SDNs as the substrate network for hosting non-SDN virtual networks, it is desired to develop an online VNE technique with a bounded competitive ratio as well as polynomial execution time in terms of problem size. To achieve this goal, this work is a primary step which solves the embedding problem with releasing the capacity constraints of physical network links. So, to the best of our knowledge, the problem of online virtual node assignment to physical nodes of SDNs with limited capacity of in-node and on-controller processing powers is presented for the first time in this work. Furthermore an online mapping algorithm is provided for the mentioned problem with poly-logarithmic competitive ratio. This can be considered as an online algorithm for general node assignment problem with batch arrivals of the requests and also can be used as a solution for online virtual machine allocation problem with batch arrivals of the requests. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.