A tree-based algorithm for virtual infrastructure allocation with joint virtual machine and network requirements

Summary Cloud providers have introduced the on-demand provisioning of virtual infrastructures (VIs) to deliver virtual networks of computing resources as a service. By combining network and computing virtualization, providers allow traffic isolation between hosted VIs. Taking advantage of this opportunity, tenants have deployed private VIs with application-optimized network topologies to increase quality of experience of final users. One of the main open challenges in this scenario is the allocation of physical resources to host VIs in accordance with quality of service computing (eg, virtual CPUs and memory) and network requirements (guaranteed bandwidth and specific network topology). Moreover, a VI can be allocated anywhere atop a network datacenter, and because of its NP-hard complexity, the search for optimal solutions has a limited applicability in cloud providers as requesting users seek an immediate response. The present work proposes an algorithm to accomplish the VI allocation by applying tree-based heuristics to reduce the search space, performing a joint allocation of computing and network resources. So as to accomplish this goal, the mechanism includes a strategy to convert physical and virtual graphs to trees, which later are pruned by a grouped accounting algorithm. These innovations reduce the number of comparisons required to allocate a VI. Experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm finds an allocation on feasible time for different cloud scenarios and VI topologies, while maintaining a high acceptance rate and a moderate physical infrastructure fragmentation.