A Path Growing Approach to Optical Virtual Network Embedding in SLICE Networks

Network virtualization (NV) is considered to be a promising solution to address the ossification of the current Internet infrastructure. With the recent advancements in optical virtualization, network virtualization can be further extended to virtualization-enabled optical substrate networks that supply connectivity-as-a-service. This integration of NV and optical virtualization is referred to as optical-based network virtualization in this work, which warrants a future-proof Internet that is not only technology-friendly (i.e, due to the service and hardware decoupling in NV) but also bandwidth-abundant (i.e., with optical networking). In optical-based network virtualization, it remains to resolve the classic virtual network embedding (VNE) problem (i.e., a NP-Complete problem) with the extra dimension of complexity from physical characteristics of the specific type of optical network (e.g., WDM or SLICE). In this work, we study this variant of the VNE problem, namely Optical Virtual Network Embedding (OVNE), in SLICE-based network virtualization. We avoid addressing the OVNE problem with simple add-on constraints to VNE but address it with two strategies: first, exploring the OVNE problem structure at different granular of network elements (e.g., path-channel and channel graph) to mitigate the complexity; second, designing a path growing process that solves the OVNE model with substantially reduced variables. The proposed approach is evaluated and compared to other representative path-based schemes with demonstrated improvements. The proposed approach can also obtain near-optimal solution to the OVNE problem with guaranteed closeness to the optimal solution.