Reconnecting Partitions on Physical Infrastructures: Towards an Expansion Strategy for Efficient Virtual Network Embedding

One of the research challenges approached recently in the literature is the efficient mapping of virtual networks on top of physical infrastructures. Although there have been efforts to solve it, we observe that a number of virtual network requests are rejected due to the exhaustion of resources only in key points of the infrastructure. In this paper, we propose an expansion strategy based on the reconnection of strongly connected components (partitions) of the infrastructure in order to suggest adjustments that lead to higher virtual network acceptance and, in consequence, to improved physical resource utilization. The obtained results evidence that an expansion of 10% to 20% of the infrastructure resources using the proposed strategy leads to a sustained increase of up to 30% in the number of accepted virtual networks and of up to 45% in resource usage compared to the original network.