Guest Editors’ Introduction: Special Issue on Advances in Management of Softwarized Networks

Softwarization of networks is an important trend, enabled by the NV (Network Virtualization), SDN (Software-Defined Networking), and NFV (Network Function Virtualization) paradigms and offers many advantages for network operators, service providers and datacenter providers. Given the strong interest in both industry and academia in the softwarization of telecommunication networks and cloud computing infrastructures, a series of special issues was established in IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, which aims at the timely publication of recent innovative research results on management of softwarized networks.