TY - GEN AV - public SP - 1 Y1 - 2016/07// EP - 16 TI - Towards 5G Software-Defined Ecosystems: Technical Challenges, Business Sustainability and Policy Issues N1 - This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher?s terms and conditions. PB - IEEE UR - https://sdn.ieee.org/publications/towards-5g-software-defined-ecosystems N2 - Techno-economic drivers are creating the conditions for a radical change of paradigm in the design and operation of future telecommunications infrastructures. In fact, SDN, NFV, Cloud and Edge-Fog Computing are converging together into a single systemic transformation termed ?Softwarization? that will find concrete exploitations in 5G systems. The IEEE SDN Initiative1 has elaborated a vision, an evolutionary path and some techno-economic scenarios of this transformation: specifically, the major technical challenges, business sustainability and policy issues have been investigated. This white paper presents: 1) an overview on the main techno-economic drivers steering the ?Softwarization? of telecommunications; 2) an introduction to the Open Mobile Edge Cloud vision (covered in a companion white paper); 3) the main technical challenges in terms of operations, security and policy; 4) an analysis of the potential role of open source software; 5) some use case proposals for proof-of-concepts; and 6) a short description of the main socio-economic impacts being produced by ?Softwarization?. Along these directions, IEEE SDN is also developing of an open catalogue of software platforms, toolkits, and functionalities aiming at a step-by-step development and aggregation of test-beds/field-trials on SDNNFV- 5G. ID - discovery10043678 T3 - IEEE SDN White Paper A1 - Manzalini, A A1 - Buyukkoc, C A1 - Chemouil, P A1 - Callegati, F A1 - Galis, A A1 - Odini, MP A1 - I, CL A1 - Huang, J A1 - Bursell, M A1 - Crespi, N A1 - Healy, E A1 - Sharrock, S KW - SDN KW - NFV KW - 5G KW - Open Mobile Edge Cloud CY - New York, NY, USA ER -