A max-flow/min-cut theory based multi-domain virtual network splitting mechanism

In network virtualization environment, if a virtual network (VN) needs to be deployed across multiple infrastructure domains, a splitting scheme of the VN should be found. With the goal of minimizing embedding cost, the existing methods solve VN splitting by linear programing. However, since the VN splitting problem is NP-Hard, these methods will take a lot of computing time when the problem scale gets bigger. In this paper, a max-flow/min-cut theory based VN splitting mechanism is proposed. The proposed method first creates a binary tree of the InPs by system clustering method, based on which the multidomain VN splitting problem is decomposed into several two-domain VN splitting problems. Then the method transforms each two-domain splitting problem into a max-flow/min-cut problem, and solves it by the shortest augmenting path algorithm efficiently. Simulations show that the proposed mechanism can improve the efficiency of VN splitting steadily and save the embedding cost.