In network virtualization, it has been considered that virtual networks are constructed over a physical network where conventional data transmission services have been utilized. Here, virtual networks have to be constructed while keeping qualities of the conventional services. In this paper, we propose a new virtual network construction in order to construct many virtual networks while keeping the robustness of a physical network by using network resources effectively. The proposed method consists of three processes: K-shortest path algorithm and Prim's minimum spanning tree algorithm, path splitting, and path migration. In the proposed method, at first, multiple topologies are designed by using the K-shortest path algorithm and the Prim's MST algorithm according to the user's request. After the topology design is completed, an admission control with network robustness of the physical network is performed. Then, if one of the designed topologies can satisfy the construction conditions, a virtual network is constructed and provided with the user. Otherwise, the path splitting and path migration are performed. Here, the path splitting is utilized to design another topology of a virtual network and path migration is used to change the topologies of the virtual networks that have already been constructed. These processes are formulated as optimization problems and those are processed by solving the optimization problems. In numerical examples, we show that our proposed method can construct a higher number of virtual networks while keeping the robustness of a physical network by comparing with the conventional method where only the Kou-Markowsky-Berman algorithm is used. Int. J. Commun. Syst. 2017; 30: e2958 1 of 21 Y. URAYAMA AND T. TACHIBANA flow table that describes each action for each data packet. Data packets can be forwarded to a corresponding virtual network according to the flow table in the OpenFlow controller.Here, the amount of available network resources is limited in the physical network, and hence, each virtual network has to be constructed so that the network resources are utilized efficiently. Some methods for designing the topology of a virtual network and allocating the network resources to the virtual network have been proposed in the literatures.In [10], in order to construct a virtual network simply over a large physical network, a topology of the virtual network is designed by combining two or more small star topologies. Yu et al. [11] has proposed a construction method of a virtual network with path splitting and path migration.In this method, a service provider obtains the revenue from a user after a virtual network was constructed. In order to maximize the revenue, virtual networks are constructed over a physical network by using the path splitting and path migration.In particular, by using the path migration, the topologies of constructed virtual networks are redesigned periodically. In [12], an architecture called DaVinci has been proposed so that network resources can be allocated to each ...