Liu Yunjie: Determinism, programmability, and cloudification will become the future network trends, comprehensively improving network service customization capabilities

At the "2020 Network 5.0 Summit", when talking about the network architecture for 2030, Liu Yunjie, an expert from the Expert Advisory Committee of the Network 5.0 Industry and Technology Innovation Alliance and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said: Service Customized Network (SCN) is a major trend. Determinism, programmability, and cloudification have become important development trends of future networks, comprehensively improving the network's service customization capabilities in terms of carrying, control, and business.

Liu Yunjie pointed out that the Internet has achieved great success in the consumer field, but will face great challenges in the production field. The production-oriented Internet has generated differentiated demands on the network. Currently, the Internet has officially entered the second half, requiring massive connections while also requiring the network to have deterministic service quality capabilities (quality certainty, massive connections, and customizable quality). The traditional best-effort IP network architecture faces huge challenges.

The development of new businesses such as industrial Internet, holographic communication, 8K/VR, etc. has put forward a series of new requirements and challenges for the network. The future network will have a very huge prospect. Liu Yunjie pointed out: The vision of the future network includes: intelligence, security, flexibility, and customization. In terms of demand, personalization will allow each industry, enterprise, user, and each application to have a customized network; on-demand will allow operators to transform from traditional bandwidth sales to providing customized network service capabilities; in terms of network utilization, the current 50% network utilization will be increased to more than 90%, further reducing user usage costs.

In Liu Yunjie's view, the network architecture for 2030 includes three aspects in the technology stack: business plane - cloud-network hyper-convergence, full cloud business: multi-cloud exchange, multilateral collaboration, cloud-edge integration, cloud native, distributed cloud; control plane - intelligent management and control of network operating system: second-level slicing, real-time measurement, closed-loop feedback, network AI; data plane - new network bearer, programmable forwarding: customizable protocols, determinism, BIER, SRv6, IP+optical, integrated conversion and storage.

Based on the service-customized network architecture, the future network needs to evolve smoothly, be backward compatible, and be autonomous and controllable on the basis of the existing network. Liu Yunjie believes that the following three key technologies need to be focused on:

Key technology 1 : Network operating system. The network operating system is the brain of the future network and is becoming the commanding height of a new round of competition. We must seize this major opportunity for change and build a full-scenario, fully compatible, high-performance, intelligent network operating system.

Key technology 2 : Deterministic network. The network needs to shift from "best effort" to "punctual and accurate", including deterministic latency, deterministic bandwidth, and deterministic packet loss.

Key technology 3 : Cloud-network integration. Multi-cloud interconnection and cloud-edge integration provide high-quality dedicated lines and rich cloud-network services to support business innovation.