Virtual Network Embedding Over Multi-Band Elastic Optical Network Based on Cross-Matching Mechanism and Hypergraph Theory

The commercialization of 5G and the explosive emergence of new applications stimulate the exponential growth of network traffic and diversification of services. It is promising to integrate multi-band elastic optical network (MBEON) and network virtualization for large volume traffic transmission and highly diverse services. However, performing virtual network embedding (VNE) for network virtualization over MBEON faces the challenge of severe inter-channel stimulated Raman scattering (ISRS) effect, which complicates the underlying physical layer effect in the substrate network. In this paper, we investigate the ISRS-aware VNE over MBEON, where a cross-matching mechanism is proposed for virtual node mapping (VNM) and a hypergraph is introduced for parallel virtual link mapping (VLM). A lightpath-level integer linear programming model is first formulated. To integrate the cost and availability of VLM, which significantly affect the performance of the VNE under the ISRS effect, into the VNM process, the “virtual node-substrate node” mapping pairs are specifically evaluated through the cross-matching mechanism. Moreover, to tackle the couplings among multiple lightpaths induced by the wide spectrum ISRS effect, hypergraphs are used to model the ISRS effect-aware quality of transmission (QoT) constraints among multiple lightpaths. A hypergraph maximal weight independent set heuristic is presented for lightpath selection, which guarantees the obedience of basic constraints and generates near-optimal solutions. Experimental results show that the proposed methods decrease blocking ratio by more than 30% compared with the benchmarks with similar computational complexity.