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Network services underpin operator revenues, and value-added services provide income beyond core (voice and data) infrastructure capability. Today, operators face multiple challenges: a need to innovate and offer a wider choice of value-added services, whilst increasing network scale, bandwidth and flexibility. They must also reduce operational costs, and deploy services far faster - in minutes rather than days or weeks.

In the recent years, the network community, motivated by the aforementioned challenges, has developed production network architectures and seeded technologies, like Software Defined Networking, Application-based Network Operations and Network Function Virtualization. These technologies enhance the highly desired properties for elasticity, agility and cost-effectiveness in the operator environment. A key requirement to fully exploit the benefits of these new architectures and technologies is …