Machine Learning Requirements for Energy-Efficient Virtual Network Embedding

Network virtualization is a technology proven to be a key enabling a family of strategies in different targets, such as energy efficiency, economic revenue, network usage, adaptability or failure protection. Network virtualization allows us to adapt the needs of a network to new circumstances, resulting in greater flexibility. The allocation decisions of the demands onto the physical network resources impact the costs and the benefits. Therefore it is one of the major current problems, called virtual network embedding (VNE). Many algorithms have been proposed recently in the literature to solve the VNE problem for different targets. Due to the current successful rise of artificial intelligence, it has been widely used recently to solve technological problems. In this context, this paper investigates the requirements and analyses the use of the Q-learning algorithm for energy-efficient VNE. The results achieved validate the strategy and show clear improvements in terms of cost/revenue and energy savings, compared to traditional algorithms.