VR-Cluster: Dynamic Migration for Resource Fragmentation Problem in Virtual Router Platform

Network virtualization technology is regarded as one of gradual schemes to network architecture evolution. With the development of network functions virtualization, operators make lots of effort to achieve router virtualization by using general servers. In order to ensure high performance, virtual router platform usually adopts a cluster of general servers, which can be also regarded as a special cloud computing environment. However, due to frequent creation and deletion of router instances, it may generate lots of resource fragmentation to prevent platform from establishing new router instances. In order to solve “resource fragmentation problem,” we firstly propose VR-Cluster, which introduces two extra function planes including switching plane and resource management plane. Switching plane is mainly used to support seamless migration of router instances without packet loss; resource management plane can dynamically move router instances from one server to another server by using VR-mapping algorithms. Besides, three VR-mapping algorithms including first-fit mapping algorithm, best-fit mapping algorithm, and worst-fit mapping algorithm are proposed based on VR-Cluster. At last, we establish VR-Cluster protosystem by using general X86 servers, evaluate its migration time, and further analyze advantages and disadvantages of our proposed VR-mapping algorithms to solve resource fragmentation problem.