Joint Spectrum and IT Resource Allocation for Efficient VNF Service Chaining in Inter-Datacenter Elastic Optical Networks

We study how to allocate spectrum and IT resources jointly for realizing efficient virtual network function (VNF) service chaining in inter-datacenter elastic optical networks. We first formulate an integer linear programming model to solve the problem exactly, and then a longest common subsequence-based heuristic is proposed. The simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithms can reuse the deployed VNFs efficiently and arrange the spectrum utilization in a much more load-balanced manner.