Service providers have witnessed a high growth in the total user base in the last decade; the mobile growth rate of smartphone users, year on year, was approximately 12.1% from 2015 to 2016, which was a significant growth with respect to the infrastructure required to service the new users. SDN comes with a great potential to solve these issues faced by service providers.

The implementation of SDN for service providers comes with certain stringent requirements. SDN should be able to provide high availability (HA) and performance coupled with support for diverse forwarding elements as well as be able to accommodate various applications northbound of the controller. In addition, network virtualization should be supported in the SDN flavor used by service providers. Here, it is expected that the SDN architecture allows customers services (such as firewalls, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), and Virtual Private Networks (VPN)) to be virtualized compared to traditional networks that require you to introduce middle appliance boxes.

Some service providers have been implementing SDN into their networks. AT&T, which is a pioneer, has seen benefits in the support of innovation, agility, and cost. AT&T program Domain 2.0 aims to control and virtualize 75% of its network using SDN methodologies by the year 2020. For more information, you can visit http://features.zdnet.com/huawei/huawei-the-carrier-challenge#transform-the-business. NTT communication has introduced SDN/OpenFlow solutions into its networks. Overcoming the 4000 VLAN limitation is one of the greatest benefits it can boast about.

Projections exist that service provider's investment in SDN and NFV will account for a revenue of over $18 billion over the years 2016-2020.