Distributed consensus-based auctions for wireless virtual network embedding

Software-Defined Networks (SDNs) based approaches represent an opportunity for easing the deployment and the management of wide-area wireless network services. In this paper, we focus on a particular SDN management mechanism that wireless infrastructure providers need to adopt to support such services: the wireless virtual network (VN) embedding problem. We formulate the problem leveraging on optimization theory, analyzing its complexity, and proposing a general distributed auction mechanism. This mechanism leverages on the max-consensus literature to guarantee bounds on the embedding time and on the performance with respect to a Pareto optimal solution. Using extensive simulations, we confirm superior resource utilization when compared with existing distributed VN embedding solutions, proving to be an attractive and flexible resource allocation approach for wireless SDNs