ation management. The implementation supports both VM and bare metal. Services Control applications OpenStack, docker Virtual Containers networks Figure 6.4 CORD architecture. 6.2 NFV Research Problems CORD takes a two-step process to transform the central office. The first step is at the individual device level. It changes the purpose-built hardware devices to commodity hardware where those software can run. This is essentially the NFV concept, which disaggregate and separate software logic from dedicated hardware. The second step in CORD is to provide a framework that can run those software in a scalable manner, using cloud and virtualization technologies. 6.2 NFV Research Problems In 2014, ETSI published a list of topics in NFV that needs further aca- demic research. The advanced research are needed to bring NFV to the next step for future development. We outline a few of these important areas as follows: Security of the virtualized infrastructure for network functions: When moving from dedicated integration box to a virtualized environment, the virtualized infrastructure needs to be secured in order to prevent attacks to the upper layer software. While specialized hardware has high capability and thus is harder to be attacked, the virtualization infrastructure may be vulnerable to various exploits and DoS attacks. Making the infrastructure secure requires further research on encryption, trust computing hardware, attack detection, and prevention methods. Abstractions for networks and carrier-scale network services in imperative and declarative languages: Network programming language has received a lot of attention in the SDN world. In NFV, programmability is rather limited SO far. With the microservices and more and more VNFs exposing northbound APIs, the pro- grammability of NFV should be improved via designing flexible and expressive languages. Impacts of data plane workloads on computer systems architectures: As explained earlier, performance can be improved by exploring shared memory, system on chip (SoC),