Green cloud virtual network provisioning based ant colony optimization

Network virtualization is being regarded as a promising technology to create an ecosystem for cloud computing applications. One critical issue in network virtualization technology is power-efficient virtual network embedding (PEVNE), which deals with the physical resource allocation to virtual nodes and links of a virtual network while minimizing the energy consumption in the cloud data center. When the node and link constraints (including CPU, memory, network bandwidth, and network delay) are both taken into account, the VN embedding problem is NP-hard, even in the offline case. This paper aims to investigate the ability of the Ant-Colony-Optimization (ACO) technique in handling PE-VNE problem. We propose an ACObased heuristic PE-VNE algorithm, called E-ACO. E-ACO minimizes the energy consumption by considering the embedding power consumption in the node mapping phase and by making an implicit coordination between the node and link mapping phases. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm and investigate different energy-aware link embedding algorithms on the ability of E-ACO