Guest Editors' Introduction: Special issue on efficient management of SDN/NFV-based systems - Part II

Abstract

I. INTRODUCTIONR ECENTLY, leading equipment providers in the network infrastructure market launched the first software-enabled appliances that support network virtualization capabilities. The main advantage of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is the separation of network control and forwarding and the fact that it allows flexible management of the network resources. OpenFlow is currently the most prominent SDN-based communication protocol.Future research should be devoted to design SDN-based systems and applications, which exploit the potential of SDN much more than the current OpenFlow-based systems. Solutions are required for managing large-scale software defined networks in a resource efficient way. There is also a need for software-defined networks able to provide automatic energy consolidation (i.e., activating only the hardware components that are required to fulfill a given network demand).Furthermore, the architects and developers of SDN-based network infrastructure need agile and productive design environments (i.e., SDKs-Software Development Kits) comparable to existing ICT software technology development. These library-based SDKs will act as mediator to existing and future SDN control planes and will be used by orchestrator services, frameworks and tools for Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs). Built-in security and efficient resource management should be thoroughly taken into account when designing these Software Development Kits.Finally, future SDN/NFV-based approaches will highly benefit from optimized virtualization techniques, which take into account the typical characteristics of the applications and services, deployed on top of the virtualized systems.

Guest Editors’ Introduction: Special Issue on Management of Softwarized Networks

“…In order to efficiently manage softwarized networks and to be able to use them to their full potential, there are many interesting challenges that need to be addressed in the areas of Software-Defined Networks, Network Virtualization, and Network Function Virtualization. In an earlier special issue on "Efficient Management of SDN/NFV-based Systems" in IEEE Transaction on Network and Service Management, published in two parts [1], [2], the main reported research contributions were: efficient resource allocation and management of softwarized network functions [3], [4], design of high-performance platforms to allow network function virtualization on commodity machines [5], enabling efficient collaboration between providers in softwarized networks [6], optimizations to flow-based software-defined networks to address the scalability and energy consolidation requirements [7], [8], programming abstractions in wireless software-defined networks [9], and improved network virtualization to more efficiently support latency sensitive applications [10].…”