Exact solutions of VNE: A survey

Network virtualization is an enabling technology of running multiple virtual networks on a shared substrate network. It aims to deal with the ossification of current network architecture. As a crucial component of network virtualization, virtual network embedding (VNE) can efficiently and effectively allocates the substrate resource to proposed virtual network requests. According to the optimization strategy, VNE approaches can be classified into three categories: exact, heuristic and meta-heuristic solution. The VNE exact solution is the foundation of its corresponding heuristic and meta-heuristic solutions. This paper presents a survey of existing typical VNE exact solutions, and open problems for the future research of VNE exact solutions are proposed.