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In traditional networks, enabling new network functions often needs to add new proprietary middleboxes. However, finding the space and power to accommodate these middleboxes is becoming increasingly difficult, along with the increasing costs of energy and capital investment. Due to the heterogeneous nature of hardware middleboxes, they suffer from long development and upgrading cycles and are hard to scale at peak load.
Network Function Virtualization (NFV) was introduced in 2012 to address the limitations of dedicated middleboxes and offers the potential for both enhancing service delivery flexibility and reducing overall costs. By leveraging virtualization techniques, network functions are implemented as software that can be deployed on virtual machines, containers, etc. In NFV, network traffic is often required to pass through a sequence of network functions, which is commonly referred to as a service function chain (SFC). NFV has stimulated new types or management philosophy of network services for switching, network monitoring, network security, traffic engineering, QoS / QoE and so on. In the last five years, we have witnessed an explosion of use cases of NFV from both academia and industry in operator networks, data centers, mobile networks, and enterprise networks. Furthermore, NFV has the potential to be widely adopted by advanced fast-growing network environments, such as 5G, wireless networks, and the Internet of Things (IoT).
However, NFV also introduces significant technical challenges that both research and industrial communities need to tackle. Since NFV is based on industry standard hardware (i.e. avoiding any proprietary hardware such as acceleration engines), a probable decrease in performance (latency, jitter, throughput, etc.) has to be taken into account. A consistent management and orchestration platform with significant visibility and operability is also required to fully delivery the management flexibility and scalability of NFV. Furthermore, network operators need to be assured that the security, resilience, and availability of their networks are not impaired when virtualized network functions are introduced. Other challenging issues of NFV include the interoperability, trust, privacy, as well as the migration and co-existence of legacy and compatibility with existing platforms.
In order to stimulate the development and deployment progress of NFV, significant research efforts are needed to fully exploit the potential of NFV to support new service types and next generation networks. The proposed feature topic issue aims to promote and expose these research activities to the China Communication readership. We solicit contributions for a Feature Topic on “Advances in Network Function Virtualization” scheduled for June 2018.
SCHEDULE
Acceptance Notification (1st round): May 20, 2018
Minor Revision Due: May 31, 2018
Final Decision Due: June 10, 2018
Final Manuscript Due: June 25, 2018
Publication Date: August 15, 2018
GUEST EDITORS
Gaogang Xie, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, xie@ict.ac.cn
TOPICS OF INTEREST INCLUDE, BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO, THE FOLLOWING:
1. Service function chaining (SFC) techniques
2. NFV-based network service enhancement
3. Traffic engineering and QoS/QoE in NFV
4. Service, slice, and infrastructure monitoring in NFV
5. Performance, interoperability, and scalability issues in NFV
6. Security, trust, and privacy issues in NFV
7. Resource sharing, isolation, and federation in NFV
8. NFV-based architectures for access networks
9. NFV-based architectures for wireless networks
10. NFV enabling next generation networks, e.g., 5G
11. NFV related architectures and platforms for the Internet-of-Things (IoT)
12. Operational results on studies related to NFV
SsSUBMISSION GUIDELINES
This feature topic “Advances in Network Function Virtualization” seeks original, UNPUBLISHED research papers reporting substantive new work in various aspects of topics above. Papers MUST clearly indicate your contributions to the topic field and properly cite related work in this field.
1. An abstract of about 150 words
2. 3-8 keywords
3. Original photographs with high-resolution (300 dpi or greater); eps. or tif. format is preferred
4. Sequentially numbered references. The basic reference format is: author name, "article name", issue name(italic）, vol, no., page, month, year. for example: Y.M Huang, "pervateture in wireless hetergeneous..",IEEE Journal on Selected Areas, vol.27, no. 5, pp 34-50, May, 2009.
5. Brief biographies of authors (50-75 words)
6. Contact information, including email and mailing addresses
Please note that each submission will normally be approximately 4500 words, with no more than 20 mathematical formulas, accomplished by up to 10 figures and/or tables.
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