Fine granularity resource allocation of virtual data center with consideration of virtual switches

Abstract Virtual data center (VDC) embedding is being regarded as a critical issue to provide performance guarantees for the future success of cloud computing. Most existing works neglected the embedding of virtual switches (VSs), especially, on the physical switches (PSs), resulting in low utilization of physical resources. Moreover, most works assumed that multiple virtual nodes in the same request cannot be embedded in the same physical node, leading to low embedding efficiency in data centers. To address the above two problems, in this paper, we first propose two fine granularity models to formulate the VDC embedding problem efficiently with the consideration of two possible embedding positions of VSs. Then traditional flow conservation law is modified to allow multiple virtual nodes to coexist on the same physical node. Finally, we propose multiple efficient embedding algorithms to solve two NP-hard problems. Comparing with existing methods, our algorithms employing heuristic information from the relaxed model can find sub-optimal solutions in polynomial time. Extensive simulation results show that our proposals outperform the existing methods in terms of acceptance ratio, revenue, and utilization.