When NFV Meets SDN: a Short Circuit or Sparkling Fireworks?

The combination of the ongoing transition into all-IP networks (VoIP, LTE, IP DSLAMs) and the recent introduction of NFV and SDN pushes the industry into a massive shift in network design. The new architecture (which is currently still on the making) will be based on an execution of the network functions on commodity servers located in small cloud nodes distributed across the network, and the use of software define mechanisms that control the network flows. This is a major turning point in the evolution of networking as we know it that introduces, in additional to the rainbow of new opportunities, also the major technical barriers. In this talk I will describe the main characteristics of the Distributed Cloud Networking parading and the unique research questions it introduces. The first part will describe recent results related the actual placement of the virtual functions within the physical network. It turns out that this problem introduces a new generalization of the facility location problem not studied before. I will describe the new problem and a novel bi-criteria approximation algorithm for it. Then, in the rest of the talk I will describe several important and interesting barriers and challenges in this area, and prospective research directions.