Multicast Virtual Network Embedding in Cloud Data Centers with Delay Constraints

Network virtualization enables the multi-tenancy concept and paves the way towards more advancements and innovation in the underlying infrastructure. With network virtualization, allocating resources to Virtual Networks (VNs) that represent tenants' requests emerges as a challenging problem. This problem is commonly known as the Virtual Network Embedding (VNE) problem, and its NP-Hard nature has drawn a lot of attention from the research community. A common feature in the existing work is that the type of communication in the VN requests was never characterized, assuming that they exhibit unicast communication only. In this paper, we motivate the importance of characterizing the type of communication in VN requests. We present a formal definition of the VNE problem for VNs with multicast communication. To the best of our knowledge, the multicast VNE problem has not been addressed in the frame of cloud computing, where the location of all the virtual machines in a given multicast VN is unknown. We propose a novel 3-steps heuristic to solve the multicast VNE problem with end-delay and delay variation constraints. Our numerical results prove the efficiency of our suggested approach over multiple metrics and against numerous embedding heuristics.