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Although there is consensus that software defined networking and network functions virtualization overhaul service provisioning and deployment, the community still lacks a definite answer on how carrier-grade operations praxis needs to evolve. This article presents what lies beyond the first evolutionary steps in network management, identifies the challenges in service verification, observability, and troubleshooting, and explains how to address them using our Service Provider DevOps (SP-DevOps) framework. We compendiously cover the entire process from design goals to tool realization and employ an elastic version of an industry-standard use case to show how on-the-fly verification, software-defined monitoring, and automated troubleshooting of services reduce the cost of fault management actions. We assess SP-DevOps with respect to key attributes of software-defined telecommunication infrastructures both qualitatively and quantitatively, and demonstrate that SP-DevOps paves the way toward carrier-grade operations and management in the network virtualization era. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

3GPP-standardized networks have been evolving at a very fast pace over the last decade. Cell capacities increased more than an order of magnitude, latencies have become considerably smaller, and worldwide deployment has changed the way people access services. In this evolution, efficient mechanisms for radio resource control have played a key role. In this article we review the RRC state transition model and follow its development from its early stage at the outset of UTRAN deployments to state-of-the art HSPAenhanced networks. This article also overviews previous work on empirical measurements from 3G networks that study the ?theory and practice? of RRC state transitions. Finally, we present our 3G Transition Triggering Tool and use it to empirically study network configuration parameters that prompt RRC transitions. Our results come to the aid of fully understanding the behavior of RRC state transitions and lead us from ?theory? to ?practice? on RRC mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With the proliferation of mobile fixed-power devices, energy consumption emerged as a vibrant research and development subject area in networking. Mobile devices are designed with several hard constraints such as low cost and small geometries, as well as, low heat dissipation, and operation using fixed power sources. Manufacturers have been adding an ever increasing set of features to small mobile devices, which are no longer binary-use gadgets, but fully-fledged computers. With respect to power management, several mechanisms have been introduced; but, by and large, gains in power consumption at the hardware level have been essentially traded for extended functionality. All in all, the overall operational time has not increased. For example, early GSM cellular phones could only allow for less than an hour of talk time in a single battery charge. By the late 1990s, top models, introduced through better engineering and an evolutionary development approach, featured talk times increased by a factor of 3-5. This level of performance has remained the same over the last decade, although it is well below user expectations. This article reviews the evolution from simple cell phones toward the feature-rich mobile networked devices we have come to expect from manufacturers, and explains the factors that have led to stagnation in operational time. We then turn our attention to the multiaccess nature of modern mobile devices and the respective implications for power management. We find that the current host-centric mobile networking paradigm, based on end-to-end always on connectivity, leads to energy-inefficient operation. Finally, this article introduces information-centric networking and outlines open research issues in the design of energy-efficient future Internet architectures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tubiquitous ultra-broadband network enabling the future Internet (FI), is not only about new releases of current network generations and services, but, more significantly, will be associated with a true revolution in the information and communications technologies (ICT) field: the network will efficiently and effectively take forward new-fangled services to everyone and everything, such as cognitive objects and cyber physical systems (CPSs). A "full immersive (3D) experience" enriched by "context information" and, in particular, "anything or everything as a service (XaaS)" are the main business drivers for massive adoption and market uptake of the new fundamental enabling technologies, beyond today's "client-server" model, where the network has been reduced to a ubiquitous "pipe of bits." XaaS refers to those services ? beyond the current models of software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and platfore as a service (PaaS), SPI models, of cloud computing ? such as data as a service (DaaS), security as a service (again, SaaS), network as a service (NaaS), knowledge as a service (KaaS), machine as a service (MaaS), and robot as a service (RaaS), which could be delivered over the advanced 5G infrastructure, without the need to own hardware, software, or even the cognitive objects themselves. Communication services, such as voice and video telephony, will be enriched and bundled with other services. The network infrastructure is expected to become the "nervous system" of the actual digital society and digital economy. This challenge calls for a complete redesign of services and service capabilities, architectures, interfaces, functions, access and non-access stratum protocols and related procedures, as well as advanced algorithms (e.g., for unified connection, security, mobility and routing management, and reconfiguration of ICT services; and any type of resource of cyber physical systems). The expected transformation will be especially true at the edge, that is, around the end user (or prosumer), where the "intelligence" already started migrating a few years ago, and where massive processing, memory, and storage capacity are gradually accumulating. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We argued boldly in the first part of the feature topic on information-centric networking (ICN) [1] that ICN marks a fundamental shift in communications and networking. Indeed, we claim that the paradigm change ICN fosters is poised to have a large impact on the way we think about telecommunications in general, the way we design network architectures in particular, the trade-offs we consider in the specification of (future) protocols, and the possibilities for new services, especially in mobile and wireless environments. For example, in the first part of this feature topic we saw how content-centric networking (CCN) can be used to build social networking applications [2, 3] at a fraction of the complexity of today's systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The second installment of the Feature Topic on network and service virtualization takes off from where Part I concluded: network function virtualization (NFV) deployment and operation. We are currently observing a transition from software-defined networking (SDN) focusing solely on programming packet-switching network elements based on lower-layer flow-oriented primitives toward the wider concept of infrastructure programmability. Such programmability extends vertically within the network stack to encompass optical layer capabilities as well as features located at upper layers of the traditional network stack. In addition, infrastructure programmability extends horizontally well beyond SDN to other resource stacks to encompass virtualized compute and storage resources. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The introduction of software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) has altered, in a wholesale manner, the way to plan for network infrastructure evolution in the forthcoming decade. This Feature Topic aims to provide a concise reference entry point to a wider audience with respect to carrier-grade networking and service virtualization with emphasis on automating the entire networking and cloud infrastructure. The first steps in network virtualization are already taking place today, although more often than not through a piecemeal approach that simply replaces hardware-based network appliances with software-based alternatives. This may help to reduce operator costs in the mid-term but does not alter the full life cycle of service creation and deployment. The real potential for network and service virtualization lies in upgrading the entire toolbox network operators have at their disposal, as state-of-the-art research and development efforts already indicate. For example, the European FP7 UNIFY project defines an architecture where the entire network, from home devices to data centers, forms a unified production environment, a dynamic service creation platform able to distribute functions and state anywhere in the network, aided by automated orchestration engines; see www.fp7-unify.eu for more details. While drafting the Call for Papers for this Feature Topic, our first goal was to attract high-quality contributions from operator and industry research labs as this topic is particularly pertinent to practitioners in the field. Carriers, in particular, can be the main beneficiaries from the emerging infrastructures based on NFV, SDN, and cloud technologies. Therefore, articles by authors working at global operators currently developing, evaluating, and standardizing solutions for network and service virtualization were particularly welcome and encouraged. In this sense, we are glad that all five selected papers for publication in this issue are penned by experts affiliated with European, American, and Asian carriers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]