This issue presents two papers related to different aspects of application servers in communication networks. Traditional communication system hardware and software architectures were based on resource intensive implementations that separated the control and data planes, and were built using special-purpose ASICs and hardware platforms, and proprietary operating systems. The ongoing miniaturization of communication systems, driven particularly by the demands placed by the explosion of wireless mobile data, requires new paradigms to reduce cost, size, and power while increasing capacity and scalability.