Virtual optical network embedding over elastic optical networks with set-up delay tolerance Elastic optical network has recently been attracted massive attentions to realize a highly-flexible virtual infrastructure needed by emerging on-demand cloud applications (e.g, ultra-high definition TV, gridcomputing, e-science). Virtual network embedding over elastic optical network provides promising solution to fine-grained sharing of node processing and bandwidth capacity resources. Due to the fact that heterogeneous cloud applications call for different levels of service differentiation, we investigate an efficient scheduling algorithm, for the first time to our knowledge, to adopt set-up delay tolerances in the embedding procedure. Particularly, requests holding-time awareness was not taken into account to represent unpredictability of expiry times in most realistic situations. Numerical simulations carried out over two prototype substrate networks, demonstrated that our proposed scheme could significantly enhance the performance of immediate mapping strategy over wide range of offered traffic loads.