An ant colony system based virtual network embedding algorithm

The virtual networking embedding (VNE) problem is a core issue in network virtualization. This is also a challenging problem as it contains different kinds of constraints, and its complexity becomes even higher in an online VNE problem with thousands of virtual network (VN) requests. In this paper, we proposed an ant colony system based VNE algorithm, called ACS-VNE, for the online VNE problem. The benefits of ACS-VNE are threefold. First, it is an ACS based algorithm so it can take full advantage of the dynamically changing heuristic information and pheromone to improve the quality of a solution. Second, different from previous work that only considers the resource of nodes in node mapping phase, we take the distance message related to links into consideration so that we can reduce the cost of VN requests. The last but not least, the algorithm tries to reduce the cost for every single VN and it helps to increase the possibility of accepting more future VN requests. The proposed method is tested on both the single VN request VNE problem and the online VNE problem. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms some previous approaches in terms of average revenue and acceptance ratio, and the results also have a relatively low cost.