China Future Network Development and Innovation Forum 2015 was held on 10th December in Nanjing, Liu Yunjie, an academician of Chinese Academy of Engineering, pointed out that the Internet has entered into the 3.0 stage since 2010, which is the era of Future Network. The time we live in has become an era of a mixture of requirements from industrial Internet, Car Networking and others, it also brings new challenges to the Internet architecture. Future Network has become the focus of global competition, developed countries including US, Japan and South Korea have been conducting State-level network experiments.
Judging by the industry, Google has become the leader of the global. Google consumes the world's largest amounts of traffic data, since the global network operators cannot meet its needs, it has been building networks with brand new architecture in 100 countries of the global, it invested $9.2 billion in last year and the whole program would take 3 years. By the influence of Google, many operators in the global including China’s three telcos have been setting their plans and developing the Future Network.
Liu Yunjie revealed that the State Council has approved Future Network as one of the 16 major scientific projects as early as March 2013, which was led by Jiangsu Future Network Innovation Institute and other three units. The project was initially set to cover 36 cities with 100 nodes and 4 data centers, as well as 1 main network gateway center and 3 side gateway centers.
This network will support a variety of programing technologies and multiple data plane devices, as a fully opened network, it will provide good test and verification environments for the Future Network.
"In the control plane, the most important thing is to solve the abstraction and unified virtualization problems of the resources.Take the 3D resources including the storage, calculation and transmission network for example, the most significant characteristic of the network is to be programmable and reconfigurable and our ultimate goal is to solve the problems in building a tremendous network. The number of Internet users in China is larger than the total number of the other top 5 including US, India and Russia, therefore, the challenge is also greater."
The pilot Future Network based on the SCN architecture was opened on 8th August, 2013, it has completed deployment in 26 major cities in China, more than 80 domestic innovation teams, as well as US XIA and European teams have been conducting trials in this pilot network, it also achieved interoperability with the existing Internet and pilot Future Networks in European and American.