Dynamic Virtual Network Embedding with Latency Constraint in Flex-Grid Optical Networks

Abstract

Nowadays, latency factor in network virtualization takes a serious attention in 5G networks upgrading. Flexgrid/elastic optical network (EON) virtualization recently become known as the fifth-generation (5G) enabling technology for the optical network slicing efficiency. As a consequence, the solution of the virtual optical network embedding (VONE) problem over EON must be solved with the latency targets guarantee. In this work, a new loading factor was suggested after adding the latency effect to the existing EON constraints by identifying its contributing factors in the network. Then, a virtual network mapping algorithm was presented to solve the VONE problem including latency constraint. Network topologies (NSFNET, USNET) were used under the dynamic scenario and four optimization methods which are; alignment and consecutiveness-aware virtual network embedding (ACT-VNE), the local resource capacity and the shortest path first fit (LRC-SP-FF), greedy algorithm and the shortest path first fit (Greedy-SP-FF), load and resource-aware based on ant colony optimization (LRA-ACO) were used and results have been compared to get the optimal solution. The blocking probability on average was increased by approximately 50 % in both topologies affected by adding latency (between 20-50 ms) as compared to the non-latency cases of previous works. Also, during all simulations, the LRA-ACO gave the best embedding performance.