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This article addresses the potential impact of emerging technologies and solutions, such as software defined networking and network function virtualization, on carriers' network evolution. It is argued that standard hardware advances and these emerging paradigms can bring the most impactful disruption at the network's edge, enabling the deployment of clouds of nodes using standard hardware: it will be possible to virtualize network and service functions, which are provided today by expensive middleboxes, and move them to the edge, as close as possible to users. Specifically, this article identifies some of key technical challenges behind this vision, such as dynamic allocation, migration, and orchestration of ensembles of virtual machines across wide areas of interconnected edge networks. This evolution of the network will profoundly affect the value chain: it will create new roles and business opportunities, reshaping the entire ICT world.

Low Power Wide Area Network technologies are used to interconnect a number of devices in a simple and efficient way. One of these technologies, LoRaWAN, is deemed as one of the most promising due to its capability to allow long range communications with very small energy consumption. LoRaWAN networks are managed by a network server implementing an Adaptive Data Rate (ADR) algorithm to allocate proper data rates to end devices. However, the standard ADR solution focuses only on the link-level performance and assigns transmission parameters to end devices one-by-one in an independent way. In this paper we propose a novel and more efficient ADR algorithm, denoted as Collision-Aware ADR (CA-ADR), which tries to minimize the collision probability when assigning data rates by considering the entire set of end devices in the network and keeping the link-level performance under control. The performance of CA-ADR is characterized and benchmarked against the standard solution as well as another proposal presented in the literature. An integrated simulation-experimental approach is used to assess results for large-scale networks and to compare two architectures based on cloud and fog computing. Results show that CA-ADR outperforms standard solutions when connectivity is good, whereas it behaves similarly in large areas. It is also shown that the improvement w.r.t. the benchmark solutions does not depend on the channel model considered (no shadowing, uncorrelated and correlated shadowing). Finally, a fog-based architecture is proved to be feasible, with the advantage of reducing the end-to-end latency.

Due to the intrinsically inefficient service provisioning in traditional networks, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) keeps gaining attention from both industry and academia. By replacing the purpose-built, expensive, proprietary network equipment with software network functions consolidated on commodity hardware, NFV envisions a shift towards a more agile and open service provisioning paradigm. During the last few years, a large number of NFV platforms have been implemented in production environments that typically face critical challenges, including the development, deployment, and management of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). Nonetheless, just like any complex system, such platforms commonly consist of abounding software and hardware components and usually incorporate disparate design choices based on distinct motivations or use cases. This broad collection of convoluted alternatives makes it extremely arduous for network operators to make proper choices. Although numerous efforts have been devoted to investigating different aspects of NFV, none of them specifically focused on NFV platforms or attempted to explore their design space. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on the NFV platform design. Our study solely targets existing NFV platform implementations. We begin with a top-down architectural view of the standard reference NFV platform and present our taxonomy of existing NFV platforms based on what features they provide in terms of a typical network function life cycle. Then we thoroughly explore the design space and elaborate on the implementation choices each platform opts for. We also envision future challenges for NFV platform design in the incoming 5G era. We believe that our study gives a detailed guideline for network operators or service providers to choose the most appropriate NFV platform based on their respective requirements. Our work also provides guidelines for implementing new NFV platforms.

This article reports a network functions virtualization proof of concept demonstrating the added value that dynamic software-defined networking control, coordinated with a flexible cloud management approach, brings to telco operators and service providers.

Cloud computing infrastructures will likely be a key component of future Internet architectures, owing to the many advantages of server and network virtualization, especially considering the emerging Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networking technologies. The cloud infrastructure will then determine the performance of the networking environment. In this paper, such issue is investigated with reference to OpenStack, a widely adopted cloud infrastructure management platform. In particular, the paper provides an insight on how OpenStack deals with multi-tenant network virtualization and evaluates the performance of its main network components by measuring packet throughput in an experimental test-bed.