The IEEE International Workshop on Multi‐Provider Network Slicing and Virtualization (MPNSV’17) will be held on July 3‐7, 2017 in Bologna, Italy along with the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft 2017, sites.ieee.org/netsoft). Network Service Providers today are limited in maximizing usage efficiency of their resources and limited in revenue generation capability from rigid service offerings which often take up t 90 days to provision. Market fragmentation has resulted in a multitude of network operators each focused on different countries and regions. This makes it difficult to create infrastructure services spanning multiple countries, such as virtual connectivity or compute resources, as no single operator has a footprint everywhere.
The Network “Softwarization” through Software Defined Network (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) aims at providing a framework for contracting, invoking and settling for the wholesale consumption of resources and virtual network services which can be provisioned in less than 90 minutes and rapidly invoked. This will enable network operators, applications providers and other stakeholders in the 5G supply chain to deliver new service value for 5G customers and at the same creating and enhancing revenue‐generating potential for 5G providers, third party verticals and others in the supply chain while extending their footprint through cooperation and co‐competition with other providers. This will allow end‐to‐end network and service elements to be jointly orchestrated in multi‐vendor, heterogeneous technology and resource environments