December 23, 2022
Future Network Development Trend and Prospect Analysis
Future Network Development Trend and Prospect Analysis
At the 2020 China Cloud Network Summit, Liu Yunjie, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, shared the development trends and prospects of future networks. Liu Yunjie said that the future network is developing in the direction of openness, white box, cloudification, and SRv6, and the end-to-end capability and programmability will be further improved in the future.
With the update and iteration of information technology, the Internet, with its low cost and high connectivity, subverted the circuit switching technology and achieved great success in the consumer field. "But at present, the Internet has begun to enter the real economy from the consumption field. While massive connections are required, the network must also have the ability to provide deterministic service quality. The traditional IP network architecture of 'best effort' will face huge challenges." Liu Yunjie sermon. For example, the three major business scenarios of 5G/B5G, including large bandwidth, low latency, and massive connections, have put forward new requirements for the future network architecture. If deterministic network capabilities cannot be provided, it will be difficult for 5G to produce a "killer network" in vertical industries. "Applications.
Therefore, the future network must adapt to the deep integration with the real economy. Every industry, enterprise, user, and even every application in the future needs a customized network. Operators need to change from selling bandwidth traditionally to providing customized network service capabilities. The utilization rate of the entire network has increased from 50% to 90%.
Based on this, facing the major opportunity of the network 2030, Liu Yunjie proposed the "Service Customized Network (SCN)" system architecture, through which the traditional Internet TCP/IP protocol and router technology rigidity and uncontrollable problems can be changed, and equipment, protocols, and routing can be realized. Flexible programming and service customization such as addressing to meet the needs of the real economy for different service qualities of the network.
How to implement service customization network? Liu Yunjie proposed the following four key technologies.
One is the network operating system. The network operating system is the brain of the future network and is becoming the commanding heights of a new round of competition in the world. It is urgent to seize the opportunity of major historical changes and build a network operating system with full scenarios, full compatibility and high performance. Liu Yunjie introduced that the network-level network operating system (CNOS) developed by Future Network Lab is a large-scale network-level operating system based on micro-service architecture. Network, metropolitan area network, data center, edge, multi-cloud and other scenarios. Currently, it has been running stably in scenarios such as China Unicom A network (400+ cities, 1100+ nodes) and China Mobile's ultra-large-scale data center.
The second is the programmable network (white box device operating system). Due to the closed interfaces of traditional network equipment, the technology evolution and upgrade cycle is slow, and it is difficult to adapt to the development of new network technologies. It is reported that AT&T and Cisco are actively deploying white-box network equipment to further improve the rapid network evolution capability. Liu Yunjie said that backbone and edge white boxes have become an important evolution trend of future operator networks, and a complete white box network ecosystem covering chips, ODM, hardware, and software has initially formed.
The third is the deterministic network. The Future Network Laboratory has successfully conducted a DIP test in cooperation with Huawei. In the Beijing-Nanjing 1,000-kilometer test environment, the deterministic forwarding capability of DIP on a large network has been verified. Services such as production control and remote surgery provide deterministic forwarding guarantees on the backbone network.
The fourth is cloud-network integration. Statistics show that currently only 40% of enterprises in my country go to the cloud. The reason is that Liu Yunjie said that the current environment for enterprises to go to the cloud is not friendly enough, and many cloud users need to go to multiple clouds. Therefore, realize multi-cloud interconnection and cloud-edge integration, turn the cloud into a shareable network resource, and the network also becomes an integral part of the cloud. At the same time, the future 5G/B5G core network will be open, virtualized, software-based, and service-oriented direction development.
In addition, Liu Yunjie pointed out that with the development of cloud computing and edge computing, the cloud integrated network (Cloud Integrated Network) will be realized in the future to organically integrate cloud computing and edge computing. Edge computing will become the "cache" of cloud computing, serving the business needs of large bandwidth and low latency, and a distributed cloud where large-scale edge computing cooperates with cloud computing.
Finally, Liu Yunjie revealed that the Future Network Innovation Research Institute took the lead in undertaking the construction of a major national science and technology infrastructure - the Future Network Experimental Facility (CENI) project, which has covered more than 40 cities, built more than 130 edge networks, and fully adopted new services Network architecture, white box equipment and large network operating system support. In addition to the Yangtze River Delta and the Greater Bay Area, where customized service networks have been launched, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Jiaodong Peninsula, Chengdu, Chongqing and other regions are also under planning.
