Orchestration and Control in Software-Defined 5G Networks: Research Challenges

Table 1

Summary of similarities and differences between SDN and NFV.

Comparison between SDN and NFV
Differences	(i) The target of SDN is the control of the packets transmission in the network (Transmission Control)
	(ii) The target of NFV is the virtualization of the functionality needed to deliver a network service (Functionality Virtualization)
Similarities	(i) SDN and NFV offer the advantage of having a better programmability and flexibility of the network, making their process more efficient and agile
	(ii) SDN and NFV are both software–oriented solutions, sharing the challenges of these kinds of softwarized solutions (see Section 4)
Complement	(i) NFV and SDN can be implemented separately, but they can complement each other
	(ii) NFV can take advantage of SDN by concatenating network functions more efficiently (see Figure 4)
	(iii) SDN can take advantage of NFV by using it as one of the best use cases where transmission programmability is a big plus