Today's enterprise networks almost ubiquitously deploy middlebox services to improve in-network security and performance. Although virtualization of middleboxes attracts a significant attention, studies show that such implementations are still proprietary and deployed in a static manner at the boundaries of organisations, hindering open innovation.In this paper, we present an open framework to create, deploy and manage virtual network functions (NF)s in OpenFlowenabled networks. We exploit container-based NFs to achieve low performance overhead, fast deployment and high reusability missing from today's NFV deployments. Through an SDN northbound API, NFs can be instantiated, traffic can be steered through the desired policy chain and applications can raise notifications. We demonstrate the systems operation through the development of exemplar NFs from common Operating System utility binaries, and we show that container-based NFV improves function instantiation time by up to 68% over existing hypervisorbased alternatives, and scales to one hundred co-located NFs while incurring sub-millisecond latency.

Abstract-The explosive growth in the worldwide use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has raised a critical concern with respect to the adequate management of their ad hoc network configuration as required by their mobility management process. As UAVs migrate among ground control stations, associated network services, routing and operational control must also rapidly migrate to ensure a seamless transition. In this paper, we present a novel, lightweight and modular architecture which supports high mobility and situational-awareness through the application of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) principles on top of the UAV infrastructure. By combining SDN+NFV programmability we can achieve a robust migration of UAV-related network services, such as network monitoring and anomaly detection as well as smooth UAV migration that confronts high mobility requirements. The proposed container-based monitoring and anomaly detection Network Functions (NFs) as employed within our architecture can be tuned to specific UAV types providing operators better insight during live, high-mobility deployments. We evaluate our architecture against telemetry from over 80 flights from a scientific research UAV infrastructure showing our ability to tune and detect emerging challenges.

Abstract. Critical infrastructures must be better protected against challenges to their data communications in the face of increasing numbers of emerging challenges, complexity and society's demand and intolerance of failures. In this paper, we present a set of challenges and their characteristics by reviewing reported incidents. Using domain specific attributes we discuss how these could be mitigated. We advocate the adoption of the latest programmable networking approaches in critical infrastructure networks and we present our proposed modular architecture with configurable monitoring and security components. Lastly, we show results from a network challenge simulation which highlights the benefits of our approach in providing rapid, precise and effective challenge detection and mitigation.