Waste of energy due to over-provisioning and overdimensioning of network infrastructures has recently stimulated the interest on energy consumption reduction by Internet Service Providers (ISPs). By means of resource consolidation, network virtualization based architectures will enable energy saving. In this letter, we extend the well-known virtual network embedding problem (VNE) to energy awareness and propose a mixed integer program (MIP) which provides optimal energy efficient embeddings. Simulation results show the energy gains of the proposed MIP over the existing cost-based VNE approach.

Peer Reviewed