Abstract—Network function virtualization (NFV) sits firmly on
the networking evolutionary path. By migrating network functions
from dedicated devices to general purpose computing platforms,
NFV can help reduce the cost to deploy and operate large IT
infrastructures. In particular, NFV is expected to play a pivotal
role in mobile networks where significant cost reductions can be
obtained by dynamically deploying and scaling virtual network
functions (VNFs) in the core network. However, in order to achieve
its full potential, NFV needs to extend its reach also to the radio
access segment. Here, mobile virtual network operators shall be
allowed to request radio access VNFs with custom resource allocation
solutions. Such a requirement raises several challenges in
terms of performance isolation and resource provisioning. In this
work, we formalize the wireless VNF placement problem in the
radio access network as an integer linear programming problem
and we propose a VNF placement heuristic, named wireless
network embedding (WiNE), to solve the problem. Moreover, we
present a proof-of-concept implementation of an NFV management
and orchestration framework for enterprise WLANs. The
proposed architecture builds on a programmable network fabric
where pure forwarding nodes are mixed with radio and packet
processing capable nodes.