Abstract
Connected devices which are commonly known as Internet of Things (IoT) are increasing at an alarming pace. Network infrastructure has to accommodate all these devices by providing adequate connectivity and delivering application based services. Service providers have to invest more in network infrastructure to meet the growing needs. To address this issue, a new concept of infrastructure sharing among service providers has emerged to reduce excessive investment costs related to infrastructure deployment. For this reason new architectures based on network virtualization are emerging to provide network sharing, handle Big data explosion from IoT devices, and simplify management tasks. 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.