Is it possible to break the half-century IP protocol and reshape the Internet? Huawei is trying.

Huawei proposes New IP

According to the Financial Times, Huawei joined the Chinese Trade Union, China Telecom, and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China to submit a proposal to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) called "New IP."

Huawei introduced a motion article entitled "New IP framework and Protocol for Future Applications" that New IP is a new type of Internet protocol framework that can better support emerging network applications, such as multi-network and holographic communications.

This will fundamentally support the variable-length, multi-semantic address of the network layer and user-defined networks.

Huawei pointed out that the existing IP protocols have faced network challenges, mainly in two aspects:

First, the development of emerging applications such as AR/VR and holographic communication requires more efficient and customized networks;

Second, the current TCP/IP protocols and frameworks have limitations and complexity on the interconnection of ManyNets (including IoT networks, satellite networks, etc.).

Nowadays, holographic communication meets the needs of people for interactive communication experiences, which also requires higher bandwidth, lower latency, and more flexible network processing. To meet the needs of these sensing applications, more detailed network services are required. ability.

Due to the incompatible IP addressing mechanisms, interconnections between IoT networks, cellular networks, and industrial networks are limited.

The subsequent introduction of multiple mapping mechanisms not only brought additional complexity to the system but also brought potential privacy and resiliency issues.

Therefore, a better solution is needed to handle the delivery and communication of all types of virtual objects, and New IP came into being.

The article states that New IP has three key characteristics:

Variable IP address length, seamless support for communication across networks;

Semantic definition of IP addresses used to identify physical and virtual objects;

The user-defined IP header allows the end-user to specify a custom function to be performed on the packet.

The article takes smart home as an example and describes the application scenarios under the new IP network:

When the motion sensor detects abnormal activity in the room, it will notify the security camera of the corresponding room to collect information through the smart home network, and then the security camera will send the collected image information to the owner's smartphone via the Internet for judgment.

If it is only a false positive, the owner can send a message to the security camera to request that the information collection be stopped.

Since all the devices in the house are connected to the same home network, the motion sensor can send notifications directly to the security camera with its domain address.

And because the new IP protocol adds an address segment (4.3.2.1) to the source address, the camera data can be directly transferred to the user's smartphone.

It is not difficult to see that in this scenario; the new IP has two advantages over the traditional IP:

First, the smart home network uses short address space for batch communication, which reduces packet overhead and improves communication efficiency;

Second, the flexibility of the new IP enables address segmentation to simplify the design of border routers. Border routers do not need to maintain address mapping instructions.

Currently, the New IP network architecture technology is under construction and will begin testing in 2021.

Will New IP bring a monopoly?

Just as all new things often lead to people's doubts and misunderstandings in the early days of its birth, New IP is also in such a dilemma.

For Huawei's New IP proposal, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia and other countries have all expressed their support. However, some scholars have questioned this "new thing", and they have two main positions:

The first is about absolute control. According to Shoshana Zuboff, a social scientist at Harvard University, Huawei proposed the new IP in order to give them absolute political control through the technical infrastructure;

The second is security. Network security company Oxford Information Laboratory believes that although New IP can perform fine-grained control of the network foundation, changes in network protocols may cause the government to implement more centralized and top-down control of the Internet and its users, which will produce security influences.

Huawei explained that the development of New IP was only to meet the technical requirements of the fast-growing digital world and did not incorporate any kind of control mechanism into the design.

At the same time, Huawei also pointed out that the research and innovation of New IP is open to scientists and engineers around the world, and they can participate in and contribute to it.

In addition, regarding security concerns, Huawei said that the architecture will have a "close command" function that will allow the central point to disconnect a specific signal source.

In addition to questioning New IP, there are also arguments that fundamentally deny New IP.

IETF (The Internet Engineering Task Force) chairman Alissa Cooper said that the development of the Internet is achieved through modular and weakly coupled building blocks, which is the excellence of the Internet. Even in a fast-scanning world, existing IP protocols are applicable.

At the IETF meeting in November 2019, a Huawei spokesperson responded:

New IP stands for a top-down overall architecture, hoping to tightly couple applications to the network, which is the original intention of Internet design.

Whether the IP is changed or not is not only a matter for the authorities but the interests of users. On Reddit, Internet users also gave their views.

User Cookie_Dodger believes that "data is data, and all data sources should be treated equally, despite the fact that network neutrality is dead ... the average person cares about how fast, useful, and affordable the service is."

Regarding "(Huawei's proposal to reshape the Internet may affect) network neutrality", Cookie_Dodger added:

If Huawei can provide Internet services with basic functions (including IE, Facebook, Netflix, etc.) and faster than the US Internet Service Provider (ISP), this would be a genius.

Most people don't care (network neutrality) ... If Huawei can sell New IP in a different way from the Internet, then ISPs cannot compete with it.

Back in 2014, scholar Laura DeNardis wrote in the book that the conflict around Internet governance is a new space in which political and economic forces can be deployed in the 21st century.

It now appears that the linguistic game played by the powers of nations as a result of the emergence of the New IP plan justifies this view.