During the evolution from 5G to 5G-Advanced, the bearer network evolves synchronously with the core network on the network side. In particular, IP evolution requires core network and bearer network to evolve at the same pace to complete the end-to-end wireless network evolution.
TCP/IP has achieved great success in the past 50 years, but the existing IP technology has great limitations facing the needs of future industrial Internet and digital economy development era. In this context, ZTE, together with the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) and the research institutes of three major telecom operators in China, released the Technical White Paper on IP Network Evolution. The white paper analyzes the vision of IP network development and the needs and challenges it is facing, and proposes a new path based on IPv6 evolution on the basis of the traditional IP network.
Future IP Network Visions
The development of future IP network can be summarized as three capability vision goals including multidimensional interconnection, precise transmission, and enhanced service, as well as three mission vision goals (Fig. 1).
The three capability vision goals of future IP network refer to the continuous improvement and evolution of three basic network capabilities: interconnection, transmission and service. Multidimensional interconnection means to continually expand network interconnection boundaries, connecting heterogeneous networks such as integrated space-terrestrial network, intelligent optical bearer and access network, B5G/6G mobile Internet, IoT, and industrial Internet, as well as industries and digital economic and social systems. Precision transmission refers to providing more powerful and accurate transmission capabilities such as ultra-high bandwidth, ultra-low latency, ultra-low jitter, and ultra-high reliability based on the basic transmission capability provided by current networks. Enhanced service means that network expansion provides a variety of enhanced services such as deterministic transmission, native security, computing and mobility based on the best-effort service, and can dynamically perceive service types to provide accurate scheduling capabilities for cloud, network, edge, and end integration.
The three mission vision goals of future IP network include industrial empowerment, ubiquitous service, and cloud-network integration. Future IP network takes industrial empowerment as the main scenario mission to serve the needs of digital industrialization and industrial digitalization such as industrial Internet, Internet of vehicles, smart city, and smart healthcare. It has the service mission to use resources anytime, anywhere and at will by users. The deployment of resources and services will gradually change from a centralized model (central cloud) to a distributed model (cloud-edge-end), allowing the network to provide nearby users with fast response, low latency, and high reliability services. As higher requirements are posed on supporting ubiquitous and differentiated services, a third mission that future IP network needs to complete is to better combine computing resources and precise transmission capabilities to achieve computing power distribution and coordination at the cloud, edge, and end levels. Future IP network based on the new infrastructure that integrates computing and networking will realize a close integration of application, network and service, and provide optimal service experience and the best network resource utilization for applications.
Two Principles for Improving Future IP Network Design
From the perspective of Internet history and evolution, the two core design principles, end-to-end and hierarchical decoupling, give IP strong scalability and flexibility, and are still applicable to development and evolution of future IP network. The evolution of the Internet should inherit the efficiency and stability of core functions and avoid revolutionary replacement. Based on the visions of future IP network, the following two principles are proposed for improving its design.
—End-to-end to empower service-based network: The IP network expands network functions to both ends. It realizes the interaction between applications and the network through intelligent plug-ins to ensure high reliability and high scalability of future network services. It also provides enhanced and common service capabilities, including deterministic transmission, native security, computing network capabilities and continuous mobile services, while maintaining the original best-effort service.
—Narrow waist model supported by the intelligent control plane: Based on the narrow waist model of the traditional IP network, the enhanced intelligent control plane is used with AI, intent network and mirror network to program atomic functions such as forwarding plane identification, routing, shaping and scheduling to meet the needs of complex applications.
IP Network Evolution Based on Ubiquitous Service Awareness
Based on the vision goals of future IP network and the two principles for improving its design, it is necessary to introduce two new functional paradigms to the IP network: ubiquitous service and network awareness.
Ubiquitous service means that the demand side of service is everywhere. The service demander does not need to know the identity and location of the service provider in advance, and the network selects the best service provider according to the needs of the service demander to achieve efficient service discovery and distribution.
Network awareness means that in the face of new ubiquitous service paradigms, IP network not only needs to perceive the service provision and needs of terminals and the cloud, but also can transfer the service status to the network layer efficiently and meet the service requirements more accurately by combining the capabilities of service demanders, service providers, and the network itself.
Focusing on new function paradigms of ubiquitous service and network awareness, ZTE has proposed a new path of IP evolution based on ubiquitous service awareness (Fig. 2).
Based on the above-mentioned two principles for improving future IP network design, the new path of IP evolution based on ubiquitous service awareness introduces home-independent protocol interfaces and the unified service naming system to effectively support the new paradigms of ubiquitous service and network awareness, thus ensuring the fulfillment of future IP network vision goals.
The home-independent mechanism ensures that users can request and obtain services at any time, anywhere as they wish. The application does not need to care about the provider and location of the service, but only needs to focus on the needs and logic of the application itself. The home-independent protocol is responsible for requesting the network to establish a service connection, manage and maintain the service-based connection status, and provide enhanced transmission functions such as service-oriented congestion control, mobility, order preservation, multi-path/multi-homing, and native security. The application can directly call the home-independent protocol interface to request a service.
The unified service naming system is introduced to enable unified allocation and scheduling of applications and the network and provide optimal network scheduling and QoS. The service ID can serve as an open service network interface that provides home-independent ubiquitous service connection management and connects virtualized resources such as computing, storage, content and capabilities. It can also ensure the network-aware service, and uniformly register, manage and index the service.
On the control plane, the integrated cloud-network transaction, orchestration and management controller in the new path is responsible for service registration, release, and query, and dynamically associates the mapping of service IDs to network-layer addresses. Service IDs must be allocated by the network, unique in the network, and remain unchanged during the service connection to ensure mobile continuity. Service routing policies and tables are delivered to network-layer devices through the control channel.
On the data plane, the service user initiates a service connection request with a service ID, and the service provider listens to the service request based on the service ID. The network edge node selects the optimal service destination node according to the service ID, orchestrates network resources, and executes the corresponding SLA policy.
The new path of IP evolution based on ubiquitous service awareness decouples the application from the service, so that the application focuses on its own logic innovation, and the common home independent services are provided by the native network. Because the application is decoupled from the network, the inefficient search process of DNS is removed and service addressing is more efficient (the efficiency in MEC scenarios can be increased by at least 100%).
The IPv6-based IP technology based on ubiquitous service awareness enables the cloud-network integrated infrastructure to provide the best service experience for service demanders. It leverages a good IP ecological chain to make applications and the network evolve smoothly, facilitates the rapid deployment of digital economy, and protects the early investment in resource construction. The integrated supply of network and service promotes the transformation of network as a service and adds the network value from a pipeline to an empowerment platform. This accelerates the deployment of digital economy and multiplies the capabilities of IP network.
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