In June, the Small Cell Forum announced that it had established a new workgroup looking at how virtualization and software defined networking (SDN) would affect its technologies. Initially this may have caused some surprise. The small cell concept has grown up around self-contained mini-base stations with local intelligence and baseband processing, which on the surface seems in opposition to virtualized approaches with the smarts centralized. However, the definition of small cells has widened to include distributed radio and distributed antenna options, and meanwhile, all the various types of access points which will be used in a HetNet are just generating more complexity, more traffic and more signalling load. In many cases there will be good reasons to centralize and virtualize…