On September 23, 2020, the 2020 China SDN/NFV/AI Conference was held in Beijing. Wei Leping, Executive Deputy Director of the Science and Technology Committee of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and Director of the Science and Technology Committee of China Telecom Group, shared his views on development trends and thinking on the key enabling technologies for network architecture reconstruction, and analyzed the relationship between SDN and NFV, Cloud, and AI.

Wei Leping pointed out that SDN has been partially applied, and it has been widely used in DC and IDC, especially cloud resources control. The application in the telecommunications network has begun, and the progress is limited, mostly SDN-like; at the same time, SD-WAN has become the entry point for SDN to move into the telecommunications network; it is widely used in network edge, 5G, IoT, optical transport network, etc.

But he pointed out that we still got a long way to go for SDN. First of all, standardization and open source are accelerating, but they are seriously lagging behind. Multi-vendor interoperability cannot be resolved, forming a semi-closed soft chimney group, which makes it difficult to realize the global vision and control of SDN across networks, layers, domains, and vendors; secondly, the excessive centralization of the control functions leads to inefficiency of flow control and concerns about the overall security of the network.

At present, the popularity of SDN in the media face declines. Wei Leping said, “This does not mean that its application is weakening, but as a basic enabling technology silently embedded in a series of actual market applications and integrated applications with other enabling technologies.  ”

In addition, Wei Leping also analyzed the relationship between SDN and NFV, Cloud, and AI technologies

In terms of SDN and NFV, SDN is most suitable for managing the virtualized infrastructure introduced by NFV, and NFV can only fully reflect the value of its networking applications with the help of SDN’s full network vision and dynamic networking capabilities. The two are merging in a unified software-based networked world.

SDN and Cloud, SDN/NFV-based network cloudification has become the consensus of the industry, and its global market in 2020 will reach 12.1 billion US dollars. He pointed out that NFV and SDN control of cloud resources have become a common trend, while NFV and SDN control of networks still need to be vigorously promoted. At the same time, NFV of cloud and network and unified SDN control are the keys to achieving cloud-network integration. Not only technology, but also the transformation of organization, process, talent, and culture are involved.

In terms of SDN and AI, the combination of SDN-based network programmable technology and A technology can build an automation platform. Through flexible network orchestration, strategy automation and intelligence, it is expected to significantly save operation and maintenance costs, improve business experience, thus laying a solid foundation for the realization of a “on-demand” network.