Dynamic Energy Efficient Virtual Link Resource Reallocation Approach for Network Virtualization Environment

The energy consumption of network virtualization environments (NVEs) has become a critical issue. In this paper, we focus on reducing the data switching energy consumption of NVE. We first analyze the data switching energy of NVE. Then, we propose a dynamic energy efficient virtual link resource reallocation (eEVLRR) approach for NVE. eEVLRR dynamically reallocates the energy efficient substrate resources (s-resources) for virtual links with dynamic changes of embeddable s-resources to save the data switching energy. In order to avoid traffic interruptions while reallocating, we design a cross layer application-session-based forwarding model for eEVLRR that can identify and forward each data transmission flow along the initial specified substrate data transport path until end without traffic interruptions. The results of performance evaluations show that eEVLRR not only guarantees the allocated s-resources of virtual links are continuously energy efficient to save data switching energy but also has positive impacts on virtual network acceptance rate, revenues and s-resources utilization.