This article provides an insight into how Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) has evolved over an approximately five-year timespan, what the current status looks like, and most importantly, what challenges remain to make this a mainstream technology. There is a particular focus on using innovative cross-industry collaborations to address many of these challenges.

One of the key goals of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is achieving energy efficiency through workload consolidation. A good example for maximizing energy savings is the Virtualization of Content Delivery Networks (vCDNs) NFV use case where the video streaming workloads exhibit significant difference between prime- time and non- prime-time usage of the infrastructure. This draft examines the practical challenges in maximizing energy efficiency for vCDN workloads. This draft proposes an open NFV architectural framework for conveying content virality information from Cloud applications such as YouTube, Twitter and mechanisms for leveraging it to maximize the energy efficiency for vCDN workloads.

The rapid technological change and uncertain future evolutions have a large impact on investment projects in the telecommunication sector. When new infrastructure networks are rolled out, the initial assumptions can prove to be untrue in the future, severely impacting the payoff. It is therefore extremely important that projects offer flexibility to allow the management to react to unforeseen changes. Management must, for example, be able to decide to speed up the project, slow it down, or even completely abandon it. However, the standard method used to evaluate investment projects, the Net Present Value analysis, is unable to capture the value of these different flexibility options. The Real Option concept, derived from financial literature, was proposed as a solution and implements this flexibility in the standard calculations. However, the Real Option Theory is only slowly getting accepted within the telecommunication sector. In this paper, we introduce the basics of real options theory and provide a practical methodology to apply real options to realistic telecom business cases. In addition, we will indicate why the characteristics of this sector make it very well suited to apply real options to investment projects. The rollout of fixed next generation access networks offers a broad range of growth options to the operator, e.g. additional network upgrades or the introduction of new services. Using real options allows one to compare the flexibility value of all these options.

We model optical burst ring networks and perform techno-economic analysis based on real-world metro networks. The study shows the optical burst ring significantly reduces cost and power consumption, as compared with optical circuit networking schemes.

This paper explains the key operator need for remotely managed, coloured transceivers in client routers and switches, carried directly over DWDM networks as 'alien wavelengths' and describes a demonstration including in-band OTN based management.