Optimization and Dynamics of Virtual Networks

Information and Communication Networks are a central infrastructural part of our modern society. Many aspects of our daily life depend upon the ubiquity of the internet and mobile communication, as well as important services such as cloud computing or storage. To use these services we continuously rely on the availability of enough bandwidth and capacity. The planning of networks that fulfill these requirements is a difficult optimization problem.

The aim of the project VINO is to develop new and practically useful mathematical methods for the optimization of virtual communication networks with temporal flexibility. We focus on the one hand on the planning and dynamic operation of flexgrid optical transport networks (Flexgrid Optical Network Design, FOND) and on the other hand the embedding and dynamic adaptation of virtual networks in single- and multi-layer substrate networks (Virtual Network Embedding Problem, VNE).

Planning a Virtual Private Network (VPN), a simplification of the VNE problem, is -- from a mathematical point of view -- a multi-layer network design problem. For the optimization of multi-layer networks there are a number of sophisticated models and solution methods. The VNE problem, however, goes beyond the standard questions in multi-layer optimization in many respects. Therefore the classical models and algorithms have to be extended and adapted, and the dynamic evolution of virtual networks has to be taken into account.