Call for Papers
& Important Dates

Aim and Scope
Network Function Virtualization (NFV) along with Software-Defined Networking (SDN) are playing a fundamental role in the softwarization of the network infrastructure. In particular, both technologies have revolutionized the way network functions and services are offered, which are often (partially) pushed towards the edge for enhanced performance, improved privacy, better agility and significant cost reduction.

Accordingly, this workshop aims at providing an overview of the softwarization process that has started occurring in recent years and is involving the network edge, with focus on future-proof approaches that will be part of the advanced 5G&B and 6G network solutions. Edge network softwarization is a fundamental topic that has to be thoroughly investigated and pushed by the research community. ENS 2025 has the goal to meet together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry that are actively involved in network edge softwarization related research projects.

Topics of Interest

The topics of interest for ENS 2025 include, but are not limited to:

• SDN and NFV distributed solutions for the network edge in 5G&B and 6G network;

• Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) solutions for network edge;

• Service and network orchestration at the edge;

• Novel solutions for data-plane programmable (e.g. P4, eBPF, XDP) edge devices; 

• Artificial Intelligence and  Machine Learning at the edge;

• Serverless computing and Function-as-a-Service in edge and fog network architectures;

• Network-aware resource provisioning in Fog Computing;

• Advances to end-to-end tunneling technologies (e.g. VxLAN, IPSEC/GRE);

• Edge computing energy efficiency and resource optimisation; 

• Support for low latency applications at the edge (e.g. Tactile Internet);

• Edge-driven use cases (e.g. Agriculture 4.0, Industry 4.0, etc.);

• Privacy and security for the network edge (e.g. zero trust networks);

• Multi-tenancy of edge networks;

• Network edge availability and protection;

• Open Hardware and Software solutions;

• Converged optical and wireless architectures at the edge;

• AI-powered resource allocation and energy optimization at the edge;

• AI for automatic fault recovery of edge computing resources;

• AI-based Digital Twin application for networked services.