  With the proliferation of mobile demands and increasingly multifarious
services and applications, mobile Internet has been an irreversible trend.
Unfortunately, the current mobile and wireless network (MWN) faces a series of
pressing challenges caused by the inherent design. In this paper, we extend two
latest and promising innovations of Internet, software-defined networking and
network virtualization, to mobile and wireless scenarios. We first describe the
challenges and expectations of MWN, and analyze the opportunities provided by
the software-defined wireless network (SDWN) and wireless network
virtualization (WNV). Then, this paper focuses on SDWN and WNV by presenting
the main ideas, advantages, ongoing researches and key technologies, and open
issues respectively. Moreover, we interpret that these two technologies highly
complement each other, and further investigate efficient joint design between
them. This paper confirms that SDWN and WNV may efficiently address the crucial
challenges of MWN and significantly benefit the future mobile and wireless
network.
