Recently, with an increased growth of network-based services, network operators are struggling to reduce their operational costs and time-to-market for network services. The steady transition from traditional network architectures to those built on Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) offers new opportunities for enabling more flexible and efficient management solutions in the 5G network.

Additionally, the rapidly growing network of connected devices with capacity of collecting and exchanging data using embedded sensors produces vast amounts of information. These new paradigms in network architectures synergistic with big data analysis could improve the operation of the network in an agile and automated way.

However, such SDN/NFV-based networks introduce major performance challenges to their realization in various aspects. While SDN/NFV will lead to a new level of service agility and operational cost savings, it gives the overheads and performance cost imposed by cloudification and softwarization. Another stumbling block is the tradeoff between system performance and and network intelligence.

Therefore, this special issue of Industrial Networks and Intelligent Systems calls for original, high-quality papers that present models, algorithms, and implementation of intelligent NFV/SDN-based networks with focus on the robustness, efficiency, agility of network services. It may also outline essential challenges, proof-of-concept studies with performance evaluations and comparison among solution approaches.