Virtual Network Embedding through Security Risk Awareness and Optimization

Abstract

Network virtualization promises to play a dominant role in shaping the future Internet by overcoming the Internet ossification problem. However, due to the injecting of additional virtualization layers into the network architecture, several new security risks are introduced by the network virtualization. Although traditional protection mechanisms can help in virtualized environment, they are not guaranteed to be successful and may incur high security overheads. By performing the virtual network (VN) embedding in a security-aware way, the risks exposed to both the virtual and substrate networks can be minimized, and the additional techniques adopted to enhance the security of the networks can be reduced. Unfortunately, existing embedding algorithms largely ignore the widespread security risks, making their applicability in a realistic environment rather doubtful. In this paper, we attempt to address the security risks by integrating the security factors into the VN embedding. We first abstract the security requirements and the protection mechanisms as numerical concept of security demands and security levels, and the corresponding security constraints are introduced into the VN embedding. Based on the abstraction, we develop three security-risky modes to model various levels of risky conditions in the virtualized environment, aiming at enabling a more flexible VN embedding. Then, we present a mixed integer linear programming formulation for the VN embedding problem in different security-risky modes. Moreover, we design three heuristic embedding algorithms to solve this problem, which are all based on the same proposed node-ranking approach to quantify the embedding potential of each substrate node and adopt the k-shortest path algorithm to map virtual links. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithms.