Chinese Journal of Computers   Full Text
Title	Research and Exploration of Next-Generation Internet Architecture
Authors	WU Jian-Ping WU Qian XU Ke
Address	(Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology (TNList), Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084)
Year	2008
Issue	No.9(1536—1548)
Abstract &   Background	Abstract As the demands on the size, functionality, performance and other aspects of Internet keep increasing, current Internet which using IPv4 as the core technology is facing severe technical challenges. In recent years, next-generation Internet and its applications has gained the particular concerns of many countries, and the developed countries have launched the national next-generation Internet research projects intended to seize the core technology of future Internet. National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) "Research of Future Internet Architecture", after nearly five years of research, made the preliminary findings in exploring the basic issues of new-generation Internet architecture: Refined four basic scientific questions of new-generation Internet architecture, preliminarily proposed multi-dimension scalable architecture of new-generation Internet and its basic elements, extended in-depth study of new-generation Internet architecture to the expansion of five multi-dimension aspects, such as the scale-scalability based on IPv6, performance-scalability based on scalable exchange node, security-scalability based on authentic IPv6 addressing, function-scalability based on 4over6 mechanism, and service-scalability based on end-to-end connectionless Quality-of-Service control. These five basic elements will form the basis of new-generation Internet. Keywords next-generation Internet; IPv6; Internet architecture; multi-dimension scalability; authentic IPv6 addressing; 4over6 Background Internet and its applications have become one of the important symbols for judging fundamental strength and economic competitiveness of a country. But Internet is facing unprecedented major technical challenges in areas of scalability, security, real-time, high-performance, mobility and ease of management. In response to these technical challenges, global next-generation Internet research has made quiet great progress in areas of core technology and standard, large-scale testbed, and fundamental theoretical research. In the mean time, people become increasingly aware of the importance, complexity, difficulty as well as the long-term character of the next-generation Internet. Although the outline of a new generation of the IPv6 based Internet has gradually clear, the fundamental theoretical issues faced by the Internet still cannot be resolved naturally. People need to make new thinking and research on the existing fundamental theoretical issues of the Internet architecture. In recent years, the fundamental research of Internet and the next-generation Internet has been gradually given serious attention. At present, the national 973 Project, "Research of Future Internet Architecture", has made some important theoretical research results: Defined four basic scientific questions of new-generation Internet architecture, preliminarily proposed multi-dimension scalable architecture of new-generation Internet and its basic elements, extended in-depth study of next-generation Internet architecture to the expansion of five multi-dimension aspects, such as the scale-scalability based on IPv6, performance-scalability based on scalable exchange node, security-scalability based on authentic IPv6 addressing, function-scalability based on 4over6 mechanism, and service-scalability based on end-to-end connectionless Quality-of-Service control. These five basic elements will form the basis of new-generation Internet.