LAUSR

Network virtualization (NV) is considered as an enabling tool to remove the gradual ossification of current Internet. In the network virtualization environment, a set of heterogeneous virtual networks (VNs), isolated from each other, share the underlying resources of one or multiple substrate networks (SNs) according to the resource allocation strategy. This kind of resource allocation strategy is commonly known as so called Virtual Network Embedding (VNE) algorithm in network virtualization. Owing to the common sense that VNE problem is NP-hard in nature, most of VNE algorithms proposed in the literature are heuristic. This paper surveys and analyzes a number of representative heuristic solutions in the literature. Apart from the analysis of representative heuristic solutions, a taxonomy of the heuristic solutions is also presented in the form of table. Future research directions of VNE, especially for the heuristics, are emphasized and highlighted at the end of this survey.