Telecom Software, Network Virtualization, and Software Defined Networks

The five articles in this special section focus on telecommunications software, network virtualization, and software defined networks. The increasingly relevant and transformational role that software and virtualization are gaining in the telecommunications field today enables unprecedented levels of abstraction, disaggregation, distribution, extensibility, slicing, and programmability in network infrastructures and services. Software-based networking is radically changing the way communication infrastructures are designed, programmed, integrated, and operated, enabling rapid and innovative network functions and network services creation and deployment, and opening the door to a faster pace of innovation in the networking and ICT industry. Such transformation, referred to as "network softwarization," is propelled by the emergence of several network technologies and paradigms, like network programmability (NP), intent-based networking (IBN), multi-access edge computing (MEC), network slicing (NS), software defined networking (SDN), and network function virtualization (NFV), which are gaining traction in production environments, and are bound to be core technologies of the maturing 5G and beyond networks. However, there are still several daunting challenges that need to be addressed before "telecom software" solutions fully leverage these technologies and become mature enough to be widespread and adopted by the industry.