Abstract
Two complementary architectures, software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) are emerging to comprehensively address several networking issues. In this work, we introduce the most embraced virtualization concepts proposed by SDN and NFV architectures. We quantitatively evaluate hardware and energy cost savings with these two SDN and NFV architectures compared to the existing state-of-the-art network 4G hardware technologies. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.