series eDiToriaL
NETWORK SOFTWARIZATION AND MANAGEMENT
Walter Cerroni Alex Galis
W elcome to the first appearance of the Network
Softwarization and Management Series of IEEE
Communications Magazine. This series represents
a scope consolidation of the two previous series: (1) Tele-
com Software, Network Virtualization and Software Defined
Networks, and (2) Network and Service Management. We
would like to thank the authors, reviewers and editors of the
previous series for their great and successful expert effort
and dedicated support.
This renewed series focuses on softwarization, manage-
ment, and their integration in communication networks and
their services. “Network Softwarization” advocates for net-
work architectures that separate the software implementing
network functions, protocols and services from the hardware
running them. Propelled by the maturity of technologies
like network function virtualization and software-defined
networking, softwarization is radically changing the way com-
munication infrastructures are designed, programmed, inte-
grated and operated, enabling rapid and innovative service
creation with easy deployment and opening the door to a
faster pace of innovation. Complementing and leveraging
network softwarization, “Network Management“ is the pro-
cess of administering networks and supporting all network
operations. It aims to integrate fault, configuration, account-
ing, performance, and security capabilities in the network
and to support self-management features, integral automa-
tion and autonomic capabilities, empowering the network
with inbuilt cognition and intelligence, and the move from
a “managed object” paradigm to a “management by objec-
tive” paradigm. The key role that software and management
are increasingly playing in telecommunications is enabling
unprecedented levels of abstraction, disaggregation, opera-
tion, integration, robustness, precision delivery, composition
and programmability in network infrastructures and services.
This renewed series selects and publishes in-depth, cut-
ting-edge articles on state-of-the-art technologies and
solutions, bringing together the latest advances, technical
innovations, case studies, research, and development in
Network Softwarization and Management in terms of main
paradigms and systems, architectures and methodologies,
software approaches, resources, functions, modelling, mea-
surement and performance analysis. This series also wel-
comes experience reports from experimental testbeds,
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COMMAG_SERIES_EDITORIAL-Shimoto.indd 14
Kohei Shiomoto Mohamed Faten Zhani
Network Softwarization and Management standards, open-
source projects and solutions.
The first issue of this series features six papers, grouped
according to key covered topics as follows.
Network Slicing, Edge/Cloud-Native Networking, Reliability
of Softwarized Network Architectures.
In the first article, “Breaking Down Network Slicing: Hier-
archical Orchestration of End-to-End Networks” by Santos
et al., the authors present a novel hierarchical orchestration
scheme for end-to-end (E2E) networks, a paradigm shift from
traditional E2E network orchestration solutions that centralize
the intelligence for managing the network infrastructure in a
single monolithic entity. Network orchestration and slicing is
one of the key enabling techniques for 5G (Fifth Generation
Technology Standard), allowing network providers (NPs)
to support services with diverging requirements on top of
their physical infrastructure. The proposed new hierarchical
orchestration architecture is both modular and extensible,
capable of supporting new types of network segments and
resources unforeseen at design time. The distributed nature
of hierarchical orchestration architecture introduces negligi-
ble overhead for provisioning network slicing, also confirm-
ing the need for a hyperstrator for coordinating network
segments ensuring consistent QoS (Quality of Service) for
network slicing.
In the second article, “MESON: Optimized Cross-Slice
Communication for Edge Computing” by Papathanail et al.,
the authors tackle the relevant issue of optimizing commu-
nications between network slices instantiated on the same
physical infrastructure. They propose MESON, a novel man-
agement and orchestration architecture aimed at improving
cross-slice communication at the edge, taking advantage of
the reduced latency and improved security due to service
co-location. A prototype implementation of the MESON
architecture is also presented and validated, showing the
required interactions for cross-slice service discovery and
optimized communications.
In the third article, “Reliability-Aware Network Slicing in
Elastic Demand Scenarios” by Gomes et al., the authors tack-
le the relevant issues of elastic demand for network resources
that impact quality of service and the elastic life-cycle of a
network slice, which defines the network elements as parts of
IEEE Communications Magazine • October 2020
10/27/20 3:10 PM

a slice. It presents a new reliability strategy to network slicing
preparation for elastic demand scenarios. Experiments using
a real resources demand dataset suggest that the new reli-
ability strategy improves the resilience of the service delivery.
Performance Measurements and Evaluation, Monitoring for
Network Management and Softwarized Networks.
The fourth article, “5G URLLC: A Case Study on Low-La-
tency Intrusion Prevention” by Gallenmüller et al., focuses
on the challenges to overcome in order to satisfy latency
requirements when deploying network slices. The authors
present a system architecture specifically tailored for hosting
low-latency virtualized network functions, which relies on
advanced software technologies and CPU (central process-
ing unit) configurations for efficient packet processing and
virtualized communications. They evaluate the performance
of their architecture applied to the use case of a virtualized
intrusion prevention function, proving that low-latency net-
work slicing is achievable even with off-the-shelf hardware
and widely adopted software components.
The fifth article, “A Virtual PEP for Web Optimization over
a Hybrid Backhaul” by Bujari et al., proposes an enhanced
performance enhancing proxy (PEP) implemented as a chain
of custom virtual network functions (VNFs) showing how
virtualization could help to optimize Web traffic performance
in the particular context of satellite communications. The
authors also demonstrate how such virtual PEP can leverage
the advanced features of the most recent IETF protocols like
QUIC (Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) with much-re-
duced latency) and MPTCP (Multipath TCP).
The sixth article, “From Capturing to Rendering: Volumet-
ric Media Delivery with Six Degrees of Freedom” by van der
Hooft et al., focuses on key aspects and challenges in terms of
quality of experience for delivering immersive media stream-
ing services enhanced with six degrees of freedom capabil-
ities. The authors present an end-to-end system architecture
involving the content source, the network domain, the client
side, as well as the required techniques to perform quality
and perception evaluation. They also report on the results of
a subjective analysis of rendered immersive video, identifying
future research directions and opportunities in this area.
In our role as series editors, we strive to achieve a fast,
quality and selective review process for all submissions in
order to quickly publish high-quality and cutting-edge papers
on relevant topics in the Network Softwarization and Man-
agement areas. We would like to thank all the authors and
IEEE Communications Magazine • October 2020
COMMAG_SERIES_EDITORIAL-Shimoto.indd 15
Series Editorial
reviewers who contributed to the series, as well as the IEEE
Communications Magazine editors and staff for their continu-
ous support. We hope that you will enjoy this first issue of the
new series and find these papers as inspiring and impactful as
we do. While we are currently selecting the articles for the
next issue, we invite interested authors to submit their work.
We welcome paper submissions anytime during the year.
The call for papers is available at https://www.comsoc.org/
publications/magazines/ieee-communications-magazine/
cfp/network-softwarization-and-management. The submitted
papers will undergo a rigorous peer-review process and, if
accepted, they will be published in the first slot available for
this series.
Biographies
Walter Cerroni [M’01, SM’16] (walter.cerroni@unibo.it) is an associate professor
of communication networks at the University of Bologna, Italy. His recent research
interests include software-defined networking, network function virtualization,
service function chaining in cloud computing platforms, intent-based northbound
interfaces for multi-domain/multi-technology virtualized infrastructure manage-
ment, modeling and design of inter-data and intra-data center networks. He has
co-authored more than 130 articles published in the most renowned international
journals, magazines and conference proceedings. He serves/has served as an asso-
ciate editor for IEEE Communications Letters and as a Technical Program Co-Chair
for IEEE-sponsored international workshops and conferences.
Alex Galis is a professor in Networked and Service Systems at University College
London (UCL) (www.ee.ucl.ac.uk/∼agalis/). His current interests are in 5G and
beyond networking, management, AI enabled networking, virtualization and soft-
warization, deterministic and high precision networking and servicing, network
and cloud programmability. He has co-authored more than 250 publications in the
future Internet areas and standards including 11 research books. He is a co-editor
of the IEEE Communications Magazine series on Network Softwarization and Man-
agement, the IEEE JSAC series on Network Softwarization and Enablers, and the
ETRI Journal published by Wiley. He has served as general chair/TPC chair/keynote
and panel chair/tutorials for IEEE conferences such as NOMS/IM/CNSM/ICIN/
CloudNet/NetSoft.
Kohei Shiomoto [M’90, SM’15] is a professor at Tokyo City University, Tokyo,
Japan. He has been engaged in R&D in the data communication industry for over
25 years since he joined NTT Laboratories in 1989. He has been active in the areas
of network virtualization, data-mining for network management, traffic and QoE
management, since he joined Tokyo City University in 2017. He served as Guest
Co-Editor for a series of special issues established in IEEE TNSM on Management
of Softwareized Networks. He has served in various roles organizing high profile
IEEE ComSoc conferences such as IEEE NOMS, IEEE IM, and IEEENetSoft. He is the
lead Series editor for the Network Softwarization and Management Series in IEEE
Communications Magazine.
Mohamed Faten Zhani is an associate professor at ÉTS Montreal, University of
Quebec, Canada. His research interests include network function virtualization,
software-defined networking and resource management in large-scale infrastruc-
tures. He has co-authored several research papers published in renowned confer-
ences and journals. He served as the general/technical program chair of several
international conferences and workshops. He is co-editor of IEEE Transactions on
Network and Service Management and the IEEE Softwarization Newsletter. He
received the IEEE/IFIP IM 2017 Young Researchers and Professionals Award for
outstanding research contributions and leadership in the field of network and ser-
vice management.
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