Network Virtualization in Spectrum Sliced Elastic Optical Path Networks

The recent decade has witnessed an evolution toward virtualization of everything for the IT industry. Resources, from utility resources to networking components and functions, are abstracted as logical or virtual services. Virtualization results in elastic, agile, and automated resource provision, and facilitates the resource pricing in a pay-as-you-go model. Among this wave, the optical community has made parallel efforts in virtualizing resources in optical networks including both optical node and link resources. A virtualized optical network can not only seamlessly support automated resource provision, but also supply high-bandwidth any-to-any connectivity for network virtualization. In this paper, we overview the motivations and architecture for optical-based network virtualization. Among candidate optical networking paradigms, we argue that spectrum-sliced elastic optical path (SLICE) networks can be considered as a promising substrate choice, and study the key enabling problem, namely optical virtual network embedding over SLICE networks (OVNESLICE). We prove the NP-completeness of the OVNE-SLICE problem, and propose two mathematical models for this problem based on a concept named path-channel. The models are evaluated in our simulation, and compared with alternative models proposed in the literature.