Huawei collaborates with researchers from University College London network protocol NEW IP, which takes into account the trends in the development of telecommunications devices of the future and the ubiquity of IoT devices, augmented reality systems and holographic communications. The project is initially positioned as an international one, in which any researchers and interested companies can take part. that the new protocol has been submitted to the International Telecommunication Union (), but it won't be ready for testing until 2021 at the earliest.
The NEW IP protocol provides more efficient mechanisms for addressing and traffic management, and also solves the problem of organizing the interaction of heterogeneous networks in the face of growing fragmentation of the global network. The problem of information exchange between heterogeneous networks, such as networks of Internet of things devices, industrial, cellular and satellite networks, which can use their own protocol stacks, is becoming increasingly relevant.
For example, for IoT networks, it is desirable to use short addresses to save memory and resources, industrial networks generally get rid of IP to increase the efficiency of data exchange, satellite networks cannot use fixed addressing due to the constant movement of nodes. Partially, they will try to solve the problems using the protocol (IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks), but without dynamic addressing, it's not as efficient as it should be.
The second problem solved in NEW IP is that IP is focused on the identification of physical objects in relation to their location, and is not designed for the identification of virtual objects, such as content and services. To abstract services from IP addresses, various mapping mechanisms are proposed, which only complicate the system and create additional privacy threats. As a solution to improve content delivery, ICN architectures are evolving (), such as NDN () and MobilityFirst, which propose the use of hierarchical addressing, which do not solve the problem of access to mobile (moving) content, create additional load on routers, or do not allow end-to-end connections between mobile users to be established.
The third task that NEW IP is designed to solve is fine-grained quality of service management. Future interactive communication systems will require more flexible bandwidth control mechanisms requiring different processing methods in the context of individual network packets.
Three key features of NEW IP are noted:
- Variable-length IP addresses that facilitate the organization of data exchange between different types of networks (for example, short addresses can be used to communicate with Internet of Things devices on a home network, and long addresses can be used to access global resources). It is not mandatory to specify the source address or the destination address (for example, to save resources when sending data from the sensor).
- It is allowed to define different semantics of addresses. For example, in addition to the classic IPv4/IPv6 format, unique service identifiers can be used instead of an address. These identifiers provide binding at the level of processors and services, without being tied to a specific location of servers and devices. Service IDs allow you to bypass DNS and route the request to the closest handler that matches the specified ID. For example, sensors in a smart home can send statistics to a specific service without determining its address in the classical sense. Both physical (computers, smartphones, sensors) and virtual objects (content, services) can be addressed.
Compared to IPv4/IPv6, in terms of accessing services, NEW IP has the following advantages: Faster query execution due to direct access to the service address without waiting for address resolution in DNS. Support for dynamic deployment of services and content - NEW IP addresses data based on the principle of "what you need", and not "where to get it", which is fundamentally different from the routing adopted in IP, based on knowing the exact location (IP address) of the resource. Building networks based on information about services, which is taken into account when calculating routing tables.
- Possibility to define arbitrary fields in the header of an IP packet. The header allows attachment of function identifiers (FID, Function ID) used to process the contents of the package, as well as metadata associated with functions (MDI - Metadata Index and MD - Metadata). For example, quality of service requirements can be defined in the metadata, according to which, when addressing by type of service, the handler that provides the maximum throughput will be selected.
Examples of bindable functions include limiting the deadline (deadline) for packet forwarding and specifying the maximum queue size during forwarding. The router will use its own metadata for each function during packet processing - for the above examples, additional information about the packet delivery deadline or the maximum allowable network queue length will be transmitted in the metadata.
Information disseminated in the media about the built-in capabilities that provide blocking of resources that contribute to deanonymization and introduce mandatory authentication, in an accessible are not mentioned and appear to be speculation. Technically, NEW IP only provides more flexibility in creating extensions, support for which is determined by router and software vendors. In the context of the ability to change IP to bypass blocks, blocking by service ID can be compared to blocking a domain name in DNS.
Source: opennet.ru