IEEE 5G Summit Trento, March 6th 2018

Shah Nawaz Khan, Researcher WiN Unit will talk about “Converging SDN and NFV at the network edges: the lightMANO approach” at IEEE 5G Summit to be held in Trento on March 6th.

NFV is a potential candidate for deploying and managing future networks. Indeed by turning network functions into
software modules and by deploying them on top of general purpose computing and networking infrastructure NFV
can make networks cheaper to deploy and to manage. At the same time SDN essentially proved to be a little more
than a network reconfiguration tool enabling only simplistic interplay models with NFV. An opportunity here exists
for re-factoring of functionalities avoiding mirroring hardware functions in software and moving toward a flexible
microservice architecture.
However, in order to achieve their full potential in 5G networks, NFV and SDN need to be converged into a single
network operating system for distributed multi-access edge computing architectures.
Such operating system will be required to leverage on lightweight virtualization technologies and orchestration
platforms (possibly collapsing VIM and Orchestrator into a single entity) and to interface with legacy systems and
heterogeneous infrastructures enabling coexistence of physical and virtual network function. Finally, edge network
service need to become slice aware and to allows for slice composition.