Survivable Virtual Network Link Protection Method Based on Network Coding and Protection Circuit

Network virtualization is believed to be a promising way for the next generation Internet to overcome network ossification. It allows multiple heterogeneous virtual networks (VNs) to be embedded onto the shared substrate network (SN) to offer more flexibility and better manageability. With the increasing deployments of VNs in a variety of networks, how to protect the VNs against the single substrate link failure has become a key challenge. In this paper, we propose a survivable VN link protection method based on network coding and protection circuit. First, we provide an integer linear programming formulation for the survivable VN link protection to maximize the long-term average revenue to cost ratio. Second, a novel protection circuit technology is introduced to augment the VN at the VN level to reduce the backup resource consumption and provide more flexible VN management. Then, an efficient heuristic virtual network embedding algorithm is developed, which makes full use of the limited resources and transforms the single substrate link protection into the single virtual link protection in multiple protection circuits. Finally, the data units from different links are encoded using network coding, which not only provides 1 + N protection to virtual links but also reduces the recovery delay. The evaluation results show that our method not only has the best acceptance ratio and long-term average revenue to cost ratio, but it also greatly enhances the achievable backup sharing and shortens the average network recovery delay.