Software-Defined Wide Area Networking

Dear Colleagues,

Software-defined networking (SDN) was born in the context of datacenters and cloud infrastructure. Due to the large success of the SDN paradigm, all sectors of networking have become deeply innovated by network softwarization. Wide-area networks (WANs) was likely one of the network segments where it was more difficult for SDN to gain momentum. WANs require high-performance (and expensive) equipment and communication links, due to the large capacity that they need and the physical-layer challenges related to information transfer over long distances. After several years of research and development of software tools and agile hardware products, today, SDN has become developed enough to be widely applied to WANs and transport networks with very effective outcomes and consolidated market success.

The impact of research outcomes on commercial products/solutions is evident in the strong efforts of standardization bodies and associations, which are supported by telco manufacturers and operators.

Nevertheless, there are still unsolved problems and potential improvements to be made, encouraging new research efforts, especially in control and management aspects, where the new techniques of machine learning and artificial intelligence can be exploited to make software-defined WANs more robust and efficient.

More specifically, the introduction of ML and AI demonstrated significant results in many areas of software-defined WANs: (i) convergent (IT+Telco) infrastructure optimization addressing design, reliability and security issues; (ii) infrastructure management dealing with advanced monitoring, automation and predictive maintenance; (iii) vertical applications, exploiting the distributed physical deployment of network nodes and the capacity of collecting and processing a colossal amount of data.

This Special Issue aims to collect strong contributions that present the latest studies, findings and leading developments on the following topics (which should be regarded as non-exhaustive):

• Software control of disaggregated optical systems;
• QoT in very-long-haul Terabit fiber networks;
• SDN-based wireless backbone and backhauling;
• SD-WAN and overlay enterprise networking;
• Distributed application scalability and edge computing;
• SDN for satellite communications and networking;
• Network monitoring;
• Network data analytics;
• Standardization of controller interfaces for the transport network;
• Southbound interface protocols;
• Multidomain WANs and hierarchical SDN architectures;
• SDN controller performance;
• SDN security issues;
• Network abstraction and YANG modeling;
• WAN reliability and resilience;
• WAN function virtualization;
• Simulation environment for design, prototyping and testing;
• AI-/ML-based predictive maintenance;
• Machine learning for traffic prediction;
• WAN reliability and resilience;
• Novel applications exploiting the TelcoCloud infrastructure.

This Special Issue will collate original, previously unpublished, and innovative contributions. Extended papers derived from previously published conference papers, as well as a limited number of survey-type papers, will be accepted.

Prof. Dr. Guido Maier
Dr. Giorgio Parladori
Guest Editors

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