embrace the upcoming big data era.

Non-technical Challenges
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In the technological domain, although facing aforementioned challenges, enabling the XaaS via WNV has the great potential gains from then network point-of-view, and then is able to provide better services to the end-users. Besides, non-technical challenges are brought when designing the models, such as large volume of contextual data, massive connections, new virtual operators, interactions between the InSPs and NSPs etc. As presented in Fig. \[fig:business\], the interaction and profit models of three layers in the WNV [@Liang], i.e., service provider (SP), mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) and INP, can be simplified to the interaction of InSP and network service operator (NSP). However, as the services can be decoupled and the role of NSP can be easily changed to InSP, different involved parties, such as service descriptions provider and service broker, should be carefully designed and it certainly requires dedicated and long-term research work.

![Challenges from business model[]{data-label="fig:business"}](business.jpg){height="8cm" width="10cm"}

Future Research Direction
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While we listed some confronted research challenges, in the following, the future research directions are presented in a bigger picture.

![Convergence of network and cloud[]{data-label="fig:cloudconvergence"}](cloudconvergence.jpg){height="8cm" width="10cm"}

Network and Cloud Convergence
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The proposed XaaS paradigm relies on the 