–     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