Software Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualization: bridging the world of virtual networks

Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) are two emerging and complementary concepts that can be considered as key players in the virtual networks world. In particular, SDN allows managing different network services through abstraction of higher-level functionality, while NFV leverages the use of virtualization technologies to virtualize specific network functions. Although SDN and NFV are considered standalone technologies, they are often put in relationship, because their connections, and overlapped use cases. In this paper, we present a short survey providing an overview of the two different models, highlighting the complementarities, together with the standardization activities and the open source community efforts to make these two paradigms connected to each other. Keywords—Software Defined Networking; SDN; Network Function Virtualization; NFV;