The IEEE NFV-SDN conference aims at bringing researchers all around the world together to share ideas that can impact the evolution and operation of NFV and SDN technologies. We encourage submission of innovative work on NFV and SDN. The following is a non-exhaustive list of topics:

– NFV and SDN architectures, protocols, application programming interfaces, and programming languages
– Design of NFV and SDN-based forwarding elements (switch/router, optical, wireless, gateway)

– Control plane architectures and network operating systems in NFV and SDN

– New forwarding abstractions and programmability paradigms

– NFV infrastructure architectures including hardware acceleration technologies

– Hardware switches for NFV

– Software switches for NFV architectures

– Open vSwitch (OVS)-related research

– Data and control plane conformance, interoperability, scalability, and performance studies

– Performance evaluation, optimization, isolation, tradeoffs with NFV workloads

– Operational experiences for NFVs

– VNFs designed around architectures for Cloud-native microservices

– Use and performance of container techniques for NFVs

– Design guidelines for scalable, available, composable, and modular VNFs

– Re-architecturing the VNFs to advance interoperability and increase performance

– Dynamic service function chaining

– OPNFV-related research & explorations

– Orchestration API
– Service chaining/orchestration and traffic steering in NFV and SDN

– App store management for NFV and SDN

– Tools for validating network services and automated deployment and management

– Applying compositional patterns for parallelism, control logic, performance, and reliability of network services

– Reliability, verification, resiliency, and fault management in NFV and SDN

– Autonomic management technologies in NFV and SDN

– Security functions and services in NFV

– Application of machine learning, big data analytics to NFV and SDN

– Scalable distributed and hierarchical controller architectures

– Software-based integration of computing, storage, and networking

– Commercial models and implications for NFV and SDN ecosystems

– Applications and usage scenarios enabled by NFV and SDN

– Applications of NFV/SDN in IoT, CPS, Smart Cities

– Behavior of combined NFV and SDN control plane

– Operational experiences

– RAN for NFV & SDN architecture options

– NFV & SDN on public/private clouds