Towards learning-based energy-efficient online coordinated virtual network embedding framework

Network virtualization is a highly effective technology for resource sharing within data centers, enabling the coexistence of multiple heterogeneous virtual networks in a shared substrate network, thus achieving resource multiplexing. The efficient embedding of a virtual network onto a substrate network, known as the virtual network embedding (VNE) problem, has been proven to be NP-hard. In response to this challenge, this paper introduces a novel method, named PPO-VNE, which leverages deep reinforcement learning for virtual network embedding. PPO-VNE employs the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm to generate policies and efficiently coordinate node and link mapping. Furthermore, it adopts a hybrid feature extraction approach that combines handcrafted features with features extracted using graph convolutional networks. The proposed reward function takes multiple objectives into account, guiding the learning process. We implemented a prototype of PPO-VNE and conducted experiments based on the simulation environment, in which the substrate network has 100 nodes, with a probability of 0.1 generating edges between any two node, and eventually there will be about 500 physical links. We evaluate the performance of our PPO-VNE approach from the perspective of overall acceptance rate, overall revenue, revenue-to-cost ratio, maximum energy consumption per unit time and revenue-energy consumption coefficient. Comprehensive simulation results in different scenarios show that our PPO-VNE approach achieves the superior performance on most metrics compared with the existing state-of-the-art approaches, where the overall acceptance rate, overall revenue, revenue-energy consumption coefficient are increased by up to 6.4%, 21.3% and 41.4%, respectively, and the maximum energy consumption per unit time are reduced by up to 22.1%.