The architecture needs to be upgraded urgently as operators lay out their future networks

The future is a world of interconnected everything, and China's Internet architecture is also facing three major upgrades: traffic, security, and software-defined networks. In order to solve these problems, the Future Network Experimental Network has been deployed in 12 major cities across the country and has been interconnected with the existing Internet.

Traffic upgrade exceeds EB per month

Traffic is the word we see most often on our mobile phones. From 10MB of traffic 10 years ago, which was like a treasure, to the launch of *** traffic packages now. The faster and faster Internet speed has led to a continuous decline in traffic costs, and the work of speeding up and reducing fees has become the work theme of operators. According to a Cisco research report, the monthly Internet traffic will reach 168.4EB (1EB is approximately equal to 1.1 billion GB) in 2019, of which video traffic will account for 80% of all traffic. The gradual popularization of new technologies such as 4K, 8K, and VR has led to larger and larger videos, and users' demand for low latency has also increased. This has brought huge challenges to the current network protocols.

In order to solve the traffic problem, the Future Network Test Network divides the network into three levels and uses multiple clouds to build the network. Among them, the backbone network bandwidth is 100G, the data center bandwidth is 40G, and the edge node bandwidth is 10G. The test network will automatically mobilize network resources according to actual needs. The test network is currently making breakthroughs in projects such as "4K/8K video", "VR/AR business", and "artificial intelligence network optimization".

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Changing the network architecture, solving problems in the cloud (Image source: Internet)

Secure upgrade to the cloud

The security of future networks must be built from the bottom up. The equipment purchased by operators is very closed, incompatible with others, and the software is very expensive. Manufacturers are dependent on operators. All nodes in the 40 cities of the future network trial project will use SDN white-label equipment. Since the future network is built through the cloud, network security will be guaranteed through the cloud. At the same time, SD-WAN technology can seamlessly integrate hardware products from different manufacturers, effectively improving the security of network transmission.

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Network infrastructure will have to support SDN (Image source: Internet)

Upgrading the network to software-defined

Software-defined networking is a commonplace topic, and future networks are inseparable from software-defined networking. Whether it is China Mobile's NovoNet, China Telecom's CTNet2025 or China Unicom's CUBENet2.0 plan, they all rely on the support of SDN. The global scheduling, elastic scaling, and flexible architecture of SDN technology can be fully utilized in future networks. In terms of future network construction, it is expected that 50% of the main networks of government and enterprise customers will be provided by SDN in 2020, and the independently developed SDN controller will also be officially put into use. Traditional inherent equipment will exist for a long time, and operators will gradually introduce SDN functions to achieve overall optimization of the architecture.

Conclusion: Three upgrades lead to three more upgrades

The first thing that will be reflected after the future network upgrade is the upgrade of user experience, which means that surfing the Internet will be faster and the experience will be better; secondly, the manufacturer's basic network equipment will also be upgraded to meet the needs of access to the future network, which will in turn drive the upgrade of the manufacturer's overall strategic layout... In fact, the upgrades brought about by the future network are far more than those mentioned in this article. It will bring a real upgrade to the entire Internet industry.