SDN use cases for service provider networks: part 1 [Guest Editorial].

Software defined networking (SDN) is being heralded as a major breakthrough for provisioning new services, commoditizing network hardware and reducing service provider capital and operational expenditures. Decoupling the control plane from the data plane has inherent advantages in terms of offering flexibility and presenting new service capabilities, but also presents operational and functional challenges. Such decoupling would create a new set of use cases, equipment, and network best practices that providers would have to imbibe in the near future. The key scope of this Feature Topic (FT) was to understand, from an implementation perspective, how SDNs can be implemented in very large networks using commodity gear or white boxes through use cases.