Abstract
Mobile operators today face yet another critical challenge as technology lifecycle becomes increasingly short and also as heterogeneous and complex network becomes exceedingly expensive and difficult to manage. With extremely competitive market and demanding users, the overall revenue structure is expected to get worse. A network architecture based on software-defined networking (SDN) and virtualization techniques gives operators greater opportunity to build cost-effective and efficient alternative to the legacy. In this work we review our Carrier Cloud as a future mobile network infrastructure that exploits both SDN and NFV in order to increase the operator agility, reduce the cost, and even disrupt the vendor landscape. This new architecture will not be fully adopted by the conservative operators at once. Technological hurdles have to be overcome, and a clear understanding of operational differences must be preceded.