At present, with the continuous popularization of networks and intelligent terminals, communication has not only been limited to the communication between people, but also needs to be communicated between people and things, and between things and things, and extended with more extensive and advanced network systems To the senses, the development of the Internet of Things has begun to meet such needs of mankind to solve the problem of sensory overload.
The entire Internet and the mobile Internet era, in fact, the main solution is the problem of information carried. In the future, with the continuous development of communication system, the whole communication system and IT system will help human beings to think. This is where cloud computing and big data play a very important role.
Information contained
China Mobile's 4G base station has reached 1.1 million through several years of construction and has more than 340 million 4G users, which is the largest in the world. With the rapid development of mobile Internet, the user traffic is also increasing.
At the same time, the Internet of things is also in a stage of rapid development and has reached 10 billion at present. Borrowing from Maslow's definition of the five categories of people, we believe that there are five levels of humanity for communication needs, and the necessary communication and ordinary communication are the bottom-level needs. The information age has just entered the threshold, the first problem to be solved is communication.
Whether telegraphing or textual means, communication is the most basic requirement for resolving the interoperability of information between people in the initial stage, and the need to be solved in the current stage has risen to the generalization of communication.
With the development of the Internet, TCPIP becomes the standard protocol of the network, or the IP protocol solves the problem of communication flooding. People on this basis more and more requirements for communication, including the form of communication, in addition to text or voice, we need a variety of multimedia communications, we need like web hyperlinks form of communication, like social networks like this Communication mode.
Based on the common communication of the bottom layer of TCPIP, a large amount of various information platforms are now superimposed. This information platform is also a networked information platform.
Therefore, in the entire Internet and mobile Internet era, we must first solve the problem of information load. With the continuous popularization and promotion of the whole network at present, including the popularization of mobile Internet and intelligent terminals, it is not only limited to the need of communication between people, but also between people and things and between things and things. People need to use Broader, more advanced web systems extend our senses.
Communication 4.0 target architecture
Recalling the whole process of communication development, we can think of ordinary communication and necessary communication as 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0, and communication 4.0 will realize information flooding, sensory flooding and intelligence flooding.
Communication 1.0 is the era of analog communication, long-distance communication through electronic signals; 2.0 is the digital age, through the codec to achieve the expansion of the entire communication system capacity and quality; 3.0 is the era of IP, to open up a variety of different networks , So that they can achieve natural interoperability, while achieving greater programmability above, so that all new superposition of networks can be easily achieved above, such as social networking; 4.0 era is actually a hardware and software separation, In the software-defined era, control and forwarding are separate, and we think of an era of convergence of IT (information technology) and CT (service provider).
Communication 4.0 has the following features: First, the agile, the current demand for communication emerge in an endless stream, the need for agile network; the second is open, the network needs to support a huge ecosystem, and ecosystems together to provide such services to Let us provide services to the general public in a low-cost and efficient manner. Thirdly, software and virtualization should be implemented in order to achieve agile and open networks.
We also have a tentative idea about the target architecture of Future Communications 4.0, divided into three parts. First, the structure of reconstruction, data-oriented, the future data center will become a basic source of communications 4.0 era network, all of these network functions will be in the form of software modules exist in the data center; Second, the reconstruction of networks and services, the future of the network It is a unified network of "IP + Optical + Cloud" based on end-to-end ICT services of cloud services. Third, operational transformation requires automation of operations and operation and maintenance.
In the meantime, in order to realize the agility of the entire network and quick response to users, it is necessary to be able to integrate R & D and operations. In other words, future development becomes part of operations. Many operations are implemented through traditional maintenance methods and configuration methods. There are a lot of operational work through the development means to achieve, this is the framework of communication 4.0 goals.
Cloud computing trends
Communication 4.0 era, the entire cloud computing will show what kind of trend?
That is software-defined everything, the original storage is better defined by the software definition, the current software-defined network (SDN) is the initial stage, we have tried different SDN solutions, found that there is a long way to go in the future maturity and standardization To go.
Followed by the container management, China Mobile has invested heavily in the container, the container is a lightweight implementation, an operating system is equivalent to different spaces, both virtual machines can achieve better resource isolation, and restart the deployment of the entire migration system, etc. There are good flexibility, the speed is also very fast, the future cloud operating system may be based on container technology, cross-data center, cross-cluster automation transfer technology to achieve this function.
There are also IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service) So far, the main business model throughout the industry is based on IaaS, PaaS early has been everyone optimistic, but because PaaS for resource isolation, metrology The lack of fee means leading to relatively slow development of PaaS in the early period. Due to the recent development of container technology and related technologies, PaaS will have a great application scenario in the future.
From the practice of global operators, the first thing we all come to the consensus is that based on telecom cloud computing system, it is bound to be built on the standard of Open Stack (a cloud computing management platform). Since last year, China Mobile has conducted its own independent R & D contest every year. Now operators in the world may all make up this shortcoming.
In addition, in the future, not only routers, switches, and firewalls become software forms, virtualization forms, future base stations, and mobile communications switches may also become virtualization and software platforms. This is also a big development trend.