IPv6+: The Connectivity Foundation of the Digital Economy – Huawei

IP addresses are a key basic resource for the Internet and are the foundation for identifying and data transmission between Internet systems. IPv4 has been in use for more than 30 years, and the IPv4-based Internet has carried a great majority of applications. When the Internet was being designed, the global reach achieved by the technology today wasnt considered, nor was IPv4 address exhaustion, which is becoming an increasing problem. On February 3, 2011, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) announced that the global central pool of available IPv4 addresses was exhausted. The inventory of IPv4 addresses of the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) has been declining ever since.

However, the rise of the digital economy has boosted the development of new services such as smart cities, industrial Internet, and telemedicine. In the future, the Internet will further expand to cover every street lamp, every unit of equipment and sensor in factories, every appliance in homes, and every smart wearable. The number of connections will explode from billions to hundreds of billions, requiring hundreds of millions of IP addresses. The IPv4-based Internet can no longer satisfy the digitalization needs of industries, so it's imperative to develop next-gen Internet for the intelligent connection of everything.

IPv6 allows for abundant addresses to assign unique identifiers to all devices that access the Internet, satisfying the needs of the era of connectivity of everything, where each object has an address and everything is online. The digital transformation of various industries poses different requirements for networks. Networks must both address connectivity and also provide high quality, flexibility, and a range of other capabilities. In the era where all things are connected, the virtual and physical worlds are deeply integrated, and cyberspace requires a secure and reliable network. IPv6 not only supports a large number of addresses, it also features more secure protocols by design and flexible scalability. IPv6 is the foundation of the next-generation Internet that will provide infinite possibilities for future network innovation.

IPv6+ is a systematic innovation on top of IP networks oriented towards the 5G and cloud era. IPv6+ enables more open and dynamic technological and service innovations, more efficient and flexible networking and service provisioning, better performance and user experience, and more intelligent and reliable O&M and security assurance. These will support the evolution and innovation of the next-generation Internet.

Compared with IPv6, IPv6+ delivers major innovations in three areas: 1) Innovation in network technologies, including segment routing over IPv6 (SRv6), network programming, network slicing, deterministic forwarding, in-band flow measurement, intelligent lossless algorithms, innovative multicast, and application awareness; 2) Innovations in intelligent O&M such as network fault discovery, fault identification, network self-healing, automatic optimization, and autonomous driving; 3) Network business model innovation represented by the expansion from the consumer Internet to the industrial Internet.

As an upgrade to IPv6, IPv6+ improves IP network innovation capabilities in six dimensions: ultra-broadband, ubiquitous connectivity, security, automation, determinism, and low latency, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Six-dimensional capabilities of the innovative IPv6+ system

Ultra-broadband: IPv6+ unleashes the potential of ultra-broadband to address uncertainties in future services. It provides end-to-end 400GE throughout the access, backbone, and data center networks to bear the traffic generated by hundreds of billions of connections and all things migrating to the cloud.

Ubiquitous connectivity: IPv6+ provides multi-service bearing and network-as-a-service capabilities. SRv6 and other technologies support end-to-end traffic scheduling, protocol simplification, network programmability, and user experience assurance, addressing the need for an integrated multi-service experience.

Security: IPv6+ creates an inherent security experience for the IP network. It takes a zero-trust approach, authenticating all accesses and granting the fewest privileges necessary. The collaborative cloud-network-security-integrated architecture for handling threats shortens the threat containment time from hours to minutes.

Automation: IPv6+ enables the autonomous driving network (ADN) that features automation, self-healing, self-optimization, and autonomy. It uses new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), in-band flow measurement, and knowledge graphs, to shorten fault recovery from hours to minutes and realize the intelligent prediction of network faults.

Determinism: IPv6+ delivers predictable, deterministic experiences of IP networks. It uses the network slicing technology to create a network environment that is secure, reliable, and predictable, reducing jitter from ms-level to s/ns-level. It also uses the lossless network technology to achieve zero packet loss in data centers.

Low latency: IPv6+ supports an immersive experience where people interact with the virtual world instantly. It reduces the end-to-end latency of a metropolitan area network (MAN) to about 10 ms, and through device-network synergy, reduces the static latency of a data center network from s-level to 100 ns-level, and the single-hop dynamic latency from 10100 s to 1 s. This enables more efficient data channels.

Enhanced IPv6+ networks improve network capabilities through large-scale commercial deployment of IPv6 and IPv6+ innovations, driving the convergence of networks and services. This plays a significant role in the digitalization of government services, manufacturing, finance, and energy, serving as the connectivity foundation for the digital economy.

IPv6+ digital government: A core requirement for developing digital governments is to address data interoperability to achieve the objective of one network for all services. IPv6+ breaks down organizational silos and implements intensive network construction to support all government organizations on the same network. This ensures efficient data sharing and efficient city operations, and enables cross-level coordination, inter-departmental collaboration, and service-oriented, Internet-based government services.

In Chinas Guangxi, the secondary plane of the IPv6+-based e-government extranet covers 14 districts and cities and 111 counties, solving problems such as different types of private networks for different departments, data sharing difficulties, and duplicated network construction. This lays a solid foundation for the convergence, sharing, and utilization of the region's government data. Now, 99.9% of the region's same-level government private networks are interoperable, 99.9% of the non-classified information systems in the region are now cloud-based, and 99.73% of the region's government service requests can be closed with one onsite visit. The efficiency and capabilities of government services have been significantly improved.

IPv6+ smart manufacturing: Today's advanced manufacturing plants are growing bigger, with each workshop housing dozens or even hundreds of units of equipment. As equipment is made by different manufacturers, challenges like varied specifications, multiple protocols, and data silos need to be overcome to digitalize equipment. IPv6+ enables efficient data flow across the entire network by building a new intelligent digital manufacturing networking system.

For example, Masteel Groups manufacturing processes involve thousands of industrial control systems, each with different quality requirements that make it necessary to isolate each service. Traditionally, independent industrial ring networks incur high OPEX and require many optical fibers. By introducing IPv6+ network slicing technology, Masteel now integrates multiple private networks into one network that can isolate multiple services. This ensures that the control signals of different systems dont interfere with each other, while reducing the cost of deploying fibers by 90% and O&M costs by 80%.

IPv6+ finance: The Bank 4.0 era has extended bank service hours from 8 hours a day, 5 days a week to 24/7. And service models have evolved from service halls to a combination of online and offline services. These changes require the support for digitalization, quick cloud migration, and cloud interoperability. Therefore, transformation of the underlying network architecture is necessary for the digitalization of the banking industry. The backbone network is key infrastructure for data communication, and is the most important part of network architecture transformation.

For example, China Construction Bank (CCB) uses IPv6+ as the basis of its single WAN and unified data center network architecture to deploy an intelligent, agile, simplified, elastic, and highly reliable financial backbone network. This network supports the one-hop cloud access of financial services. It can also predict and quickly locate network faults through network-wide sensing. The O&M automation rate has increased by 80% and the emergency handling time has been reduced from hours to minutes, so financial services remain uninterrupted.

IPv6+ energy: A good indicator of smart mining is safe and efficient operations that are barely staffed or even unattended. Applications like smart mechanized mining and smart tunneling has promoted the massive deployment of underground application system devices. IPv6+ provides network infrastructure support for the innovation and development of coal mines in the new era, leveraging massive address availability, embedded security capabilities, network slicing, and in-band flow measurement.

At Xinyuan Coal Mine in Shanxi Province, IPv6+ has enabled the bearing of multiple services (such as the 5G video network and a comprehensive surveillance network) on a single network, avoiding overlapping investment in network construction and reducing costs by 50%. The use of in-band flow measurement technology has shortened network fault location time and the time network O&M personnel are underground by 80%. Smart mining has relocated coal miners from a complex and harsh underground environment to a safe and clean centralized control center, greatly enhancing safety and efficiency.

The scope and nature of IP network connectivity have expanded from connecting people to connecting everything. The emergence of IPv6 and IPv6+ will greatly boost the intelligent connectivity of everything and application scenario innovations. IPv6+ is a next-generation technology in the data communications industry, and a systematic innovation for IP networks oriented towards 5G and cloud. 5G and optical access both need IPv6+. With the cloud at one end and enterprises, homes, and individuals at the other, the IPv6+-based IP network transfers intelligence and computing power to everything to power the growth of the digital world.

Similar to how the convergence of 5G and various industries has unleashed the huge potential of 5G+, the technological innovation and capability expansion of IPv6+ on top of IPv6 have shown immense value beyond providing massive IP addresses. This is attracting a range of industries to collaborate and innovate, and push the Internet into a new era of IPv6-based intelligent IP networks. Looking toward the future, Huawei Datacom will continue its commitment to IP technology innovation, provide high-quality datacom products for customers in various industries, and enable ubiquitous intelligent IP connections, to build a fully connected, intelligent world.

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IPv6+: The Connectivity Foundation of the Digital Economy - Huawei