Node Splitting for Improved Virtual Network Embedding: A Feasibility Study

When the residual resources on a virtualized substrate network (SN) are insufficient to meet the resource demands from the requested virtual network (VN) at specific locations, we can attempt to accommodate the VN by allocating resources at alternative locations and transparently serve the accesses to the VN by having them internally rerouted to the actually allocated locations. In this letter, we explore the feasibility of nodal resource splitting in such alternative allocation scenarios. We find that in order to facilitate such alternative allocations, we should first define the node-link resource dependencies. Once the dependencies are given, we demonstrate that the splitting can visibly improve the SN utilization and the request rejection rate for VN embedding requests under many network scenarios.