Virtualisation of cellular networks can be seen as a way to significantly reduce the complexity of processes, required nowadays to provide reliable cellular networks. The Future Communication Architecture for Mobile Cloud Services: Mobile Cloud Networking (MCN) is a EU FP7 Large-scale Integrating Project (IP) funded by the European Commission that is focusing on how cloud computing and network function virtualisation concepts are applied to achieve virtualisation of cellular networks. It aims at the development of a fully cloudbased mobile communication and application platform, or more specifically, it aims to investigate, implement and evaluate the technological foundations for the mobile communication system of Long Term Evolution (LTE), based on Mobile Network plus Decentralized Computing plus Smart Storage offered as one atomic service: On-Demand, Elastic and Pay-As-You-Go. This paper provides a brief overview of the MCN project and discusses the challenges that need to be solved.

The maturity reached by virtualisation technology enabled great innovation for efficient applications and services development and delivery, independent of the underlying hardware equipment, especially with the large deployment of off-the-shelf hardware based cloud infrastructures. In order to take advantage of this technology, the existing network functions have to be developed and adapted to the new paradigm. However, traditional telecom services are still implemented on dedicated hardware resulting in high deployment and maintenance costs compared to the other already cloudified services. ETSI Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) aims to fill this gap by applying to telecom the virtualisation technologies. This paper introduces a set of three software architectures for efficient virtualisation of IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) in different operator environments responding to the high level requirements of the ETSI NFV use case for virtualizing operator core network functions. Additionally, a management architecture for simplifying the deployment and runtime orchestration of such a virtual service on top of a cloud infrastructure is presented. Furthermore, one of the IMS software architectures was implemented based on the Fraunhofer FOKUS Open IMS Core, measured and evaluated on top of an OpenStack cloud

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Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has become a widely acclaimed approach to facilitate the management and orchestration of network services. However, after rapidly achieving a widespread success, NFV is now challenged by the overwhelming demand of computing power originated by the never-ending growth of innovative applications coming from the Internet world. To overcome this problem, the use of h/w acceleration combined with NFV has been proposed. This way, the computing performance of commodity servers can be greatly enhanced, without losing the advantages offered by NFV in service management. In this paper, to demonstrate the potentialities of NFV and h/w acceleration, a Virtual Network Function for video coding (video Transcoding Unit-vTU) is presented. The vTU is accelerated by a General Purpose GPU, and is based on Open Source software packages for media processing. The vTU architecture is firstly described in details. A thorough characterization of its computing performance is then reported, and the obtained results are compared to those achieved with non-accelerated and/or non-virtualized versions of the vTU itself. Also, the performance provided by an original, GPU accelerated version of the VP8 encoder is presented. The activities described in this paper have been carried out within the EU FP7 T-NOVA project.

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