In an NFV environment, a single physical infrastructure commonly operates multiple virtual networks (i. e., network slicing) which makes the resource management and service assurance complicated. The network slice is expected to be customer-oriented and meet the Quality of Experience (QoE) requirements as well as conventional Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. However, unified and QoE-aware service assurance is largely uncharted in the management and orchestration architecture of NFV systems. To address this problem, we introduce a novel framework for assuring the sliced services running in a Network Function Virtualization (NFV) environment and discuss the core functions of the framework. Our Service Assurance (SA) framework extends the ETSI MANO architecture. Based on a hierarchical architecture, the framework collates information collected from different layers contributing to the provision of a service within a shared physical infrastructure. Moreover, it allows the creation of a mapping from the underlying infrastructure performance to the QoE such that NFV management and operation can be adapted to assure both QoS and QoE. A set of measurement results are provided to illustrate the significance of such a mapping.

`Roam Like at Home' is a slogan used to express the new roaming regulation applied to the countries within the European Union. Since June 15th, 2017, mobile network subscribers of the network operators within the European Union can use mobile services in other European countries without having extra charges for it. Although almost all mobile subscribers within countries of the European Union benefits from the new roaming rule, many mobile service providers are yet to be adapted to this change. Therefore, those providers bear the burden of the cost for the inter-provider traffic. Moreover, the latency between subscribers and their operator specific content must be reduced in order to provide a roaming service `like at home'. An emerging virtualization technology such as a Network Function Virtualization (NFV) sheds light on these challenges. This paper describes the concept of the mobile roaming service and our on-going implementation work as a part of 5G-PPP 5GEx project which aims at localizing inter-provider mobile traffic within the virtualized network infrastructure.

Network service providers are facing challenges for deploying new services mainly due to the growing complexity of software architecture and development process. Moreover, the recent architectural innovation of network systems such as Network Function Virtualization (NFV), Software-defined Networking (SDN), and Cloud computing increases the development and operation complexity yet again. One of the emerging solutions to this problem is a novel software development concept, namely DevOps, that is widely employed by major Internet software companies. Although the goals of DevOps in data centers are well-suited for the demands of agile service creation, additional requirements specific to the virtualized and software-defined network environment are important to be addressed from the perspective of modern network carriers. In this paper, we thoroughly debate DevOps requirements for developing a modern service creation platform by taking EU FP7 project UNIFY as a reference architecture and suggest the corresponding extensions of UNIFY interfaces that meet the discovered requirements.

Today, most devices have multiple network interfaces. Coupled with wide-spread replication of popular content at multiple locations, this provides substantial path diversity in the Internet. We propose Multi-source Multipath HTTP, mHTTP, which takes advantage of all existing types of path diversity in the Internet. mHTTP needs only client-side but not server-side or network modifications as it is a receiver-oriented mechanism. Moreover, the modifications are restricted to the socket interface. Thus, no changes are needed to the applications or to the kernel.