Design of high throughput and cost-efficient data center networks supporting NFV

Data centers (DC) are characterized by the sharing of compute and storage resources to support Internet services. Today, many companies (Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc.) use data centers to offer storage, web search, and largecomputations services withmultibillion dollars business. The servers are interconnected by elements (switches, routers, interconnection systems, etc.) of a network platform that is referred to as Data Center Network (DCN). Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technology introduced by European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) applies the cloud computing techniques in the telecommunication field allowing for a virtualization of the network functions to be executed on software modules running in data centers. Any network service is represented by a Service Function Chain (SFC) that is a set of VNFs to be executed according to a given order. The running of VNFs needs the instantiation of VNF instances (VNFI) that in general are software modules executed on virtual machines. The support of NFV needs high performance servers due to higher requirements by the network services with respect to classical cloud applications. The purpose of this special issue is to study and evaluate new solution for the support of NFV technology.