Demonstrations at IEEE NFV-SDN 2021 complement the conference with practical showcases from industry on best practices in the field as well as advances currently underway in research and academia. Topics of interest and within the scope of IEEE NFV-SDN 2021 include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Advances in network control planes, forwarding abstractions, and data plane programmability
• Dynamic service function chaining/orchestration and traffic steering
• Intent and policy-based management
• Smart service delivery and orchestration
• Application of machine learning and big data analytics to manage virtualized networks
• Machine learning tools to optimization for next-generation network optimization
• ML/AI techniques and models for network and service management
• Resiliency, fault management, and self-healing functions
• Advanced tools for automated design, deployment, validation, and network problem diagnosis
• Data/control plane performance, interoperability, and scalability studies
• Design guidelines for modularity, scalability, high availability, and interoperability (e.g. container and microservice implementations)
• Usage scenarios such as SD-WAN, IoT, Smart Grid, Smart Cities, etc.
• Improvements in future communication infrastructure enabled by SDN and NFV including RAN, evolution to 5G, public, private and hybrid clouds
• Operational experience (e.g. lab. and field trial results)