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CALL FOR PAPERS

Special Issue of the International Journal on Network Management (IJNM)

Software-Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualization for
Flexible Network Management

Publication: January 2016


Scope of the Special Issue

Economical and operational aspects motivate the demand for fundamental
changes towards more flexible management solutions. This trend is
stimulated by Network Virtualization and Software Defined Networks
(SDN) that emerged in recent years. These technologies allow networks
to be run in a more flexible and cost efficient manner. As an emerging
topic, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) allows even further
flexibility by migrating network functions (e.g., DHCP, PPPoE,
Firewalls, DPI, SBCs) from dedicated hardware to virtual machines
running on commodity hardware. Virtualized network functions are
appealing to network operators since they can be migrated and flexibly
adapted to current demands.

The newly achieved flexibility in network management, particularly for
NFV, opens a set of currently unresolved key questions concerning i)
function placement, ii) service orchestration iii), reliability and iv)
performance. How to operate virtualized network functions in a reliable
manner by providing redundancy and load balancing? Can virtualized
network functions provide performance guarantees required for network
operations and how can such virtualized services be benchmarked and
compared? Where should network functions be placed to optimize the
network subject to different design criteria? How can services be
orchestrated? How can network monitoring in such flexible networks be
used to dynamically manage them?

This special issue aims at addressing these and related questions in
virtualized networks. Contributions to the following topics are of
specific interest, but are not limited to:

- SDN/NFV architectures and applications
- Monitoring and QoE management in virtualized networks
- Advanced content placement in virtualized networks
- Business considerations and economic aspects
- Network Operating Systems and Languages
- SDN in Mobile and Wireless Networks
- SDN/NFV Resource allocation algorithms
- Reliability of virtualized network functions
- SDN/NFV-based service orchestration
- SDN/NFV-based network deployment and management
- Security Management in SDN/NFV-based systems
- Theoretical foundations of SDN/NFV networks
- Construction and deployment of Service Function Chains
- Fault correlation and diagnosis in virtualized networks

Submission Guidelines

Authors should submit their papers in PDF format only to
http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/nem

Paper submissions should not exceed 20 pages (double-space). Author
instructions are available at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal
/10.1002/(ISSN)1099-1190/homepage/ForAuthors.html and the respective
LaTeX template can be found at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal
/10.1002/(ISSN)1099-1190/homepage/latex_class_file.htm

All submissions will be peer-reviewed. In case of acceptance, the final
and camera-ready version has to take into account comments of reviewers
and needs to follow the template’s requirements.

Important Deadlines

- Submission Deadline: July 14, 2015 (extended)
- Notification of Acceptance: Aug 31, 2015
- Final Version: Oct 15, 2015
- Publication: Jan 2016

Submissions in PDF format only to http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/nem

Guest Editors

* Theophilus Benson, Duke University, USA
tbenson@cs.duke.edu
* David Hausheer, TU Darmstadt
hausheer@ps.tu-darmstadt.de
* Oliver Hohlfeld, RWTH Aachen
oliver@comsys.rwth-aachen.de
* Thomas Zinner, University of Wuerzburg, Germany
zinner@informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de