MDPI Future Internet Special Issue 2019 : Special Issue on Network, Compute, and Storage Management Using Software Defined Environments (SDEs)

Dear Colleagues,

Software-Defined Networks (SDN), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), and Cloud computing are emerging paradigms and technologies that will impact the next generation of network, compute, and storage systems. A closely-related trend in the Telecommunication industry, softwarization, reduces the operational cost of building and maintaining networking, computing, and storage infrastructures by automating processes and provides more flexibility in designing, managing, and controlling of them. In near future, most of the network, compute, and storage functions and services could be virtualized and fully decoupled from underlying physical infrastructure. It has been estimated that the size of the software-defined networking (SDN) market worldwide will increase from 0.41 billion U.S. dollars in 2013 to 13.8 in 2021; the economic impact confirms the importance of the emerging technologies describe above.

The term Software Defined Environments (SDEs), originally introduced by IBM, has been used to refer to fully automated and orchestrated IT infrastructures that simplify IT and network management, reduce costs, improve the time to market of new products, and help to optimize the use of the resources and infrastructure. An SDE has four essential building blocks including Software Defined Networks (SDN), Software Defined Storage (SDS), Software Defined Compute (SDC), and Software Defined Management (SDM). An SDE, allows an owner to manage workloads independent of systems and underlying infrastructure. An SDE provides management functionality independent of specific vendors’ equipment or specific technologies. In addition, an SDE provides programming APIs that can be used to program the environment as a whole and select the best available resources based on the current status of the infrastructure, application characteristics, and required security and service level policies.

SDEs are at early stage of development and further investigation of these emerging technologies is warranted. This special issue will focus on the theme “Network, Compute, and Storage Management using SDEs” . We invite researchers and practitioners to submit papers describing original, previously unpublished work, not currently under review by another conference, workshop, or a journal on all topics related to SDEs. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Topics:

Orchestration systems for Software-Defined infrastructure
Policy-based software defined infrastructure
Programmable Data Planes (PDPs): applications, programming languages, compilers, and debuggers
Software Defined infrastructure across a large enterprise
Network Operating Systems (NOS)
Novel applications for SDN
High level programming languages and APIs for SDN
Software Defined Network Management Systems
SDN testbeds and deployments
Intent based programming APIs for SDN
Software-defined datacenter management
Software Defined Cloud (SDC)
SDN debugging and testing tools
Network monitoring using SDN
Virtualized network functions
Novel architectures for SDN and NFV
Software Defined Storage (SDS)
Software-Defined Infrastructures (SDI)
Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN)
Software Defined Compute (SDC)
Software Defined Management (SDM)
Use of orchestration for NFV
Novel solutions for security issues of SDN/NFV-based networks
Software Defined Servers and Virtualization
Performance evaluation of Software Defined Networking systems

Prof. Douglas Comer
Mr. Adib Rastegarnia
Guest Editors