A Survey on Algorithmic Aspects of Virtual Optical Network Embedding for Cloud Networks

An important challenge in network virtualization is the process of assigning physical resources to virtual network requests, where virtual node resources represent the demands of IT capacities while virtual links are connected between pairs of virtual nodes. Due to their special characteristics, physical optical network infrastructures requires specific strategies to solve this problem, called virtual optical network embedding (VONE). This paper presents a survey on most relevant VONE schemes found in the literature. A discussion of important algorithmic aspects of this problem is presented, such as optical-layer restrictions, global performance metrics, and possible research directions. In addition, we propose a new taxonomy of VONE approaches, considering the type of optical networks, dynamic or static scenarios, and the optimization method.