In September 2019, six Chinese engineers walked into the conference room of the United Nations agency International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and presented a "radical" Internet protocol proposal to representatives from more than 40 countries: "New IP".
This new proposal, planned by Huawei in conjunction with China Unicom, China Telecom, and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), aims to replace the current TCP/IP protocol.
The TCP/IP protocol was finalized in 1978, and it did not meet the connection needs of AR/VR, holographic communication, autonomous driving, and the Internet of Things after 10 years. This is the origin of Huawei 's new IP.
As early as last May, Huawei had published a technical document called "New IP Technologies" on the official website. In September, it published the article "New IP: Exploiting Future Data Networks" in the journal "Telecommunications Science" Detailed article on "New Connections and New Capabilities".
The reason why New IP suddenly entered the public eye is due to the in-depth article recently published by the Financial Times. In addition to the consideration and vision of Huawei on New IP, the article also cites the judges' views on the proposal.
They believe that New IP embeds centralized thinking into the Internet technology architecture, questioning the privacy security and access freedom of the Internet in the future.
At the press conference of Huawei's 2019 annual report at the end of March, a reporter from Mcgill University in Canada also asked about this. Huawei's rotating chairman Xu Zhijun said that New IP is currently under research technology, and it is only a purely technical issue. New IP is politicized. "
Is the "old agreement" not enough?
To understand the background of Huawei's proposal of New IP, we may first understand the TCP/IP that has been "serving" for more than 40 years.
In the 1970s, different types of networks had different packet sizes, speeds, frequencies, and error rates, and information exchange was not convenient.
If you can develop a "language" that computer networks adhere to, this problem can be solved.
After years of research and improvement, Vint Cerf and Rob Kahn finally completed the "language" in 1978. That year, the TCP/IP protocol completed the infrastructure construction.
Among them, the IP protocol assigns an address to each networked device; and the TCP protocol is responsible for discovering transmission problems. As long as it finds data that does not meet the transmission standard, it sends a signal that requires retransmission until all data reaches the destination correctly.
This process is like sending multiple postcards at the post office at one time. The existence of the TCP/IP protocol can ensure that these cards are sent to the point, no disorder, no duplication, and no errors.
In 1983, ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet, officially ran this protocol, and various networks were connected together, and the Internet was officially announced.
According to the information provided by Huawei experts in the article "New IP: Exploiting New Connections and New Capabilities for Future Data Networks," "Although countries have been working hard to explore the next-generation technology of data communication, the TCP/IP protocol itself has undergone some optimization improvements. (For example, the introduction of IPv6 to solve the problem of exhaustion of 8-bit IPv4 addresses, etc.), but it has never changed the core of TCP/IP technology, and its inherent defects have not been resolved. "
The author points out that at the beginning of the TCP/IP design, the main requirement of the network was end-to-end reliable communication between fixed hosts, with global reachability, high survivability, and best effort forwarding capabilities.
But after 8-10 years, TCP/IP cannot meet all the demands put forward by "Internet of Everything, Internet of Everything".
In addition, according to the documents submitted by Huawei to ITU published by the Financial Times, Huawei believes that due to technological and commercial development, the Internet has slowly “fragmented” into many networks, but due to their incompatible addressing mechanisms, the interconnection between networks has become a challenge.
In addition, emerging applications such as AR/VR, holographic communication, and the Internet of Things will involve more physical and virtual objects that need to be marked, which requires the Internet's bottom layer to have more efficient and customizable capabilities.
Based on this thinking, Huawei is leading an ITU group to conduct research on the network architecture required in the future, and New IP is one of them.
"Technical issues" that were controversial right from the start
"Under the existing network technology standards, video conferencing, IPTV, Internet of Vehicles, etc. all share the same network equipment. These flows affect each other, and it is bound to fail to create an independent low-latency, highly reliable network. Unbearable. "
Zhilianda CTO, former Alibaba Cloud senior technical expert Tao Hui told InfoQ that the New IP standard "covers packet routing rules, VPN network establishment, improves link utilization, improves IDC's network planning capabilities, and supports public networks Use IP multicast, more efficient network device monitoring and more. "
From the technical interpretation published by Huawei last September, New IP is defined as "inheritance innovation" on the existing architecture of TCP/IP, which expands and enhances the capabilities of existing protocols.
According to the information disclosed by the Financial Times, New IP is described by Huawei as "a more dynamic IP addressing system", which enables devices between the same network to communicate directly without having to pass information through the entire network
. However, it is this technical feature that has attracted some criticism. The Financial Times quoted some interviewers as arguing that this new agreement provides the network with "tracking capabilities" and that the government or operators can identify each transition to the network Equipment, users and information packages, and even interfere with individual access rights.
In this regard, Huawei explained that the development of New IP is only to meet the technical requirements of the rapidly developing digital world and did not design any control mechanism.
At the same time, Huawei also pointed out that the research and innovation of New IP is open to scientists and engineers all over the world, who can participate and contribute to it.
Sources who attended the ITU meeting stated that Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran have all expressed their support for the New IP proposal, and some New IP technologies will be ready for testing within 2021.
According to FT reports, at the next major ITU meeting in India in November 2020, Huawei will further advance the adoption of the proposal. If the majority of ITU delegates agree, New IP will be certified as an official standard for launch.
Bilel Jamoussi, the leader of the ITU research group, pointed out that ITU 's responsibility is not to judge whether New IP will have privacy risks.
Tao Hui, CTO of Zhilianda believes that "New IP will inevitably land in China. Although the United States is unlikely to adopt New IP, similar standards will be introduced." This also means that there may be two sets of standards coexisting in the future.
At the press conference of Huawei's 2019 annual report at the end of March, Xu Zhijun, Huawei's rotating chairman, discussed the origin of the name New IP:
"For so many years, IP technology has been unable to meet the fast-developing industrial Internet's demand for low latency and security. The goal of 5G is also to meet the growing consumer mobile broadband demand and further meet the industry-oriented low-time The Internet of Things needs to be extended and connected. The same is true for New IP. "
He said, "5G is called New Radio. I think the future of IP is similar to the future mission of 5G. Why not call it New IP?"
Xu Zhijun also said, "Everyone is just to solve the problem of IP facing the future and carry out free research and discussion. It is not as complicated as imagined, nor as many political issues as imagined, and the technical topic under study should not be politicized."
Regarding "New IP", every party in the world has its own views and perspectives, as well as its own choices. But it is undeniable. We are entering a different era. Technology is more and more not just technology. People begin to question the values of algorithms, even the values of protocol standards ...
Science and technology are essentially a tool that originates from the law and "is in front of people". It was originally easy to form a consensus. But what is worrying is that today's "people beforehand" value determinism is increasingly bringing about a new environment of distrust and division.
The world has changed, which not only brings more complex latitudes for thinking to technology companies, but also may bring greater friction to the development of the entire human technology tree.
