Virtualization of network functions can be possible by evolving standard IT virtualization technologies that aim at consolidating many network equipment types onto industry standard high volume servers, switches and storage. It entails implementing network functions in software that can run on industry standard server hardware. Software-based network functions can be instantiated from anywhere in the operator’s network, data center or end-user premises, without the need to install new or additional hardware equipment. Network Functions Virtualization is different from [[Network virtualization]] as it is concerned with virtualizing only the network functions and not the network as a whole.
== Software defined access==
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Software defined access is a part of NFV allows cellular network administrators to manage their access services and cell site baseband resources more easily through abstraction of the L1 functionality into virtual routines This replaces having to manually configure and deploy hardware based L1 processing . SDA has become more important with the emergence of Cloud RAN in which a cellular network uses a centralized or regional Server Farm to process all or some of its cell site traffic at the L1 level.
SDA decouples the specific hardware of a given cell site and/or Cloud RAN baseband resource pool (the data plane – L1) ,from the upper stack software and signaling management (the control plane – L2 and up)
The inventors of SDA claim that it will mitigate vendor interoperability risk ,and enable advanced network features such as: CoMP, Massive dense networks, etc
