Network Function Virtualization

Chapter 1Introduction

Internet has truly become the service of the digitized society now and delivers a broad range of services such as banking, e‐commerce, social networking, media, content storage, and much more. Currently, there is a strong trend to penetrate coverage and usage of Internet by going mobile. The usage by individual is steadily increasing both in time of use and bandwidth demand of application in use. Still there is 80% of the global population that lacks access to Internet. Clearly, the technologies building Internet need to evolve in order to facilitate the steady growth by cost‐efficient and sustainable means. Moreover, it is commonly recognized in the technical literature that the Internet has constraints in terms of mobility, quality of service, security, and scalability (e.g., due to IP address starvation and semantic overloading of IP addresses) even if patches exist for fixing any particular problem.

Over the past decades, the telecommunications industry has migrated from legacy telephony networks to telephony networks based on an IP network. This shift allows the mobile network operators to leverage the high bandwidth, multiplexing, innovative products, and services that have been long deployed and tested in IP network and then stimulates a new wave of revenue generation. Since the emergence of cellular data networks, the volume of data traffic carried by cellular networks has been growing continuously due to the innovation of mobile devices, mobile applications, ...