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

R 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.