IEEE 5G Summit in Trento

The 5G Summit will take place in Trento, Italy, on March 6, 2018. It will be the first time the event is organized in Italy.
IEEE 5G Summits are organized by IEEE Communication Society within a strategic framework based on the principles that embrace Industry’s interests and priorities, while integrating IEEE and ComSoc’s objectives. In order to engage industry members with high value and innovative technologies, IEEE Communication Society plans to hold a series of high impact one day Summits in emerging technology areas (e.g., SDN/NFV, 5G, IoT, Big Data, and Cybersecurity).

Shah Nawaz Khan, researcher of WiN Unit (CREATE-NET) will talk about “Converging SDN and NFV at the network edges: the lightMANO approach”

NFV is a potential candidate for deploying and managing future networks. Indeed by turning network functions into software modules and by deploying them on top of general purpose computing and networking infrastructure NFV can make networks cheaper to deploy and to manage. At the same time SDN essentially proved to be a little more than a network reconfiguration tool enabling only simplistic interplay models with NFV. An opportunity here exists for re-factoring of functionalities avoiding mirroring hardware functions in software and moving toward a flexible microservice architecture. However, in order  to achieve their full potential in 5G networks, NFV and SDN need to be converged into a single network operating system for distributed multi-access edge computing architectures. Such operating system will be required to leverage on lightweight virtualization technologies and orchestration platforms (possibly collapsing VIM and Orchestrator into a single entity) and to interface with legacy systems and heterogeneous infrastructures enabling coexistence of physical and virtual network function. Finally, edge network service need to become slice aware and to allows for slice composition.

More info here