Shared protection in virtual networks

Network virtualization is regarded as a promising concept solving the Internet ossification problem for the future Internet and as a method to provision well-framed cloud services. Providing resilience continues to be a key issue for future networks due to the high service requirements, growing data volumes, and the dependency of businesses and society on cloud services. We propose a novel architecture allowing the request of a complete resilient virtual network and - if necessary after its creation - sharing of its parts with existing virtual networks. As a proof of concept, we design networks using shared protection that can be optionally provisioned either at the virtual or at the physical layer and perform simulations. Our results show that shared protection models outperform the dedicated protection models with a reduction of the virtual network setup cost of up to 22% and of the required physical network capacity of up to 70% for the used topology and parameters. Moreover, for certain cost settings having resilience in the virtual layer brings a cost benefit of up to 83%. However, having resilience in the physical layer results always in a lower delay, number of virtual links and a higher network utilization efficiency.