Recent advances and future challenges for mobile network virtualization

Recently, network function virtualization (NFV) was proposed as a paradigm shift in the telecommunication industry. Both industry and academia have drawn significant attention in mobile network virtualization. NFV decouples the software implementation of network functions from the underlying hardware, leading to considerable reductions in operating expenses (OPEX) and capital expenses (CAPEX), and facilitating the network deployment. However, as an emerging technology, NFV brings both challenges and opportunities in developing new architectures, applying and deployment. In this paper, we first survey the related work of NFV, and then propose promising research directions in this area.