Network Function Virtualization: Challenges and Opportunities for Innovations

Network function virtualization was recently proposed to improve the flexibility of network service provisioning and reduce the time to market of new services. By leveraging virtualization technologies and commercial off-the-shelf programmable hardware, such as general-purpose servers, storage, and switches, NFV decouples the software implementation of network functions from the underlying hardware. As an emerging technology, NFV brings several challenges to network operators, such as the guarantee of network performance for virtual appliances, their dynamic instantiation and migration, and their efficient placement. In this article, we provide a brief overview of NFV, explain its requirements and architectural framework, present several use cases, and discuss the challenges and future directions in this burgeoning research area.