Network Virtualisation Trends: Virtually Anything Is Possible by Connecting the Unconnected

The large and increasing variety of proprietary hardware appliances in existing networks poses great difficulties in both their management and the launch of new network services. This is related to a plethora of requirements at the core network part such as energy costs, capital investment challenges and skills necessary to design, integrate and operate increasingly complex hardware- based appliances. At the end user side, the evolution of the Internet of Things envisions to increase the number of connections by yet another order of magnitude (from ~10 billion currently connected "Things"), bringing unprecedented challenges in network scalability, resource efficiency, and privacy considerations. This paper tackles the previous challenges under the prism of network function virtualization focusing on the following use cases: Software Defined Networking controlled wireless integration service, virtual cell management, and sensor networks virtualization. We discuss how the different facets of Virtualization promise to alleviate or resolve some of these challenges, acting as a catalyst for the realization of disruptive networking paradigms, both in the core network and in the end-user side.