Tao Huang

F. Richard Yu

Gaogang Xie

Yunjie Liu

With the tremendous advances in the field of information and communications technology (ICT),and the emergence of new applications, such as 4K/8K,AR/VR, Internet of Things, and Industrial Internet and so on, the traditional Internet has faced severe challenges on scalability, flexibility, controllability, mobility and security and so on. In order to cope with these challenges, numerous promising future Internet architectures and techniques, such as software-defined networking (SDN),information-centric networking (ICN), and network virtualization (NV), have emerged over the last few years and been attracted a lot of attention.

Meanwhile, experimentation has played a very important role in advancing networking research. Although analysis and simulation are important tools in studying the behavior of data traffic and analyzing new protocols and algorithms, it is essential that new research ideas are validated on real systems. To facilitate researchers, a variety of testbeds have been built in academia, national laboratories and industry. Example testbeds include GENI, PlanetLab, FIRE, CENI, etc. By conducting experiments on these testbeds, researchers can well validate their ideas for developing better future Internet architectures.

Motivated by the above considerations, we focus on the development of future Internet architecture and testbeds, and we aim to bring researchers, developers,practitioners, and educators together to share experiences and advance the state of the art in architecture and experiment research in future Internet areas such as software-defined networking, information-centric networking, network virtualization, cloud computing and so on.

This special issue comprises six best papers selected from the submissions, three best papers are focused on the software-defined networking, the others are about the virtual network embedding, named data networking and heterogeneous cellular networks, respectively. The topics in this special issue cover both theoretical analyses and practical systems.

Software defined networking not only provides a flexible and convenient way to support fine-grained traffic engineering, but also provides better Quality of Experience (QoE) for customers. Due to the policy of the evolution from legacy networks to the SDN ignore the customers’ benefit. Therefore, Yuan et al. propose an optimization scheme, named as Optimal Migration Schedule Based on Customers’ Benefit (OMSB), to produce an optimized migration schedule and maximize the benefit of customers. And by comparing the OMSB with other six migration schemes in terms of the benefit of customers. The proposed OMSB scheme suggest that the sequence of the migration plays a vital role for customers. As the control plane is separated from the packet forwarding plane in SDN, SDN based traffic engineering can increase network utilization and improve Quality of Service (QoS). Yan et al. propose an SDN Based scheduling algorithm called CATS to detect and control congestions in real time. The proposed algorithm CATS not only effectively eliminates network congestions but also improves the QoS with lower packet loss rate and balanced link utilization. Then the authors use Mininet,floodlight and video traces to simulate the SDN enabled video networking. By introducing dynamic and multiple controllers to deploy the control plane in SDN is a promising technique to mitigate the effect of malicious attacks. Lu et al. study the timing problem in dynamic control plane from theoretically and experimentally perspective, respectively. Then the authors formulate the problem as a renewal reward process and propose an optimal algorithm in deciding the right time to schedule with the objective of minimizing the long-term loss rate.Network virtualization is an enabling technology to remove the resistance of the current network, particularly for the IP network, which has been recognized as one key technologies for the future network. In network virtualization, one of the most important issues is how to realize the virtual network embedding (VNE). Different from the existing VNE algorithms, which are mostly heuristic algorithm or the exact algorithms, Cao et al. propose an effective algorithm, labeled as VNE-RSOT (Restrictive Selection and Optimization Theory) to make a trade-off between the heuristic and the exact. Then the simulation results are illustrated to show that virtual network request(VNR) acceptance ratio of VNE-RSOT is higher than the best-behaved heuristic. In named data networking(NDN), the key challenges are to manage large-scale forwarding tables, to lookup long names of variable lengths, and to deal with frequent updates. To cope with these challenges, He et al. make a deep study on the binary search, and propose a novel mechanism to ensure correct searching path without neither additional backtrack costs nor redundant memory consumptions. Then along any binary search path, a bloom filter is employed at each branching point to verify whether a said prefix is present, instead of storing that prefix here By introducing caching in heterogeneous cellular networks (HCNs) has been considered as a promising technique in future 5G mobile networks, and energy efficiency in future 5G mobile networks is one of the most important performance index. Although some works have been done to consider the caching strategy design in HCNs for energy efficiency, there still exists much space to develop a more energy-efficient system by combining both the caching mechanism and the base station activation mechanism.Therefore, Xie et al. take the activation mechanism for the base stations into account and study the problem of joint caching and base station activation mechanism, and a Quantum-inspired Evolutionary Algorithm (QEA) is proposed to iteratively provide the global best solution to realize the system energy saving.

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their great efforts in reviewing the submitted manuscripts. We would like to thank the editors of this special issue.

Biographies

Tao Huang, is a Professor with the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT), China. He has carried out basic research in areas such as network architecture and software-defined networking (SDN), put forward the definition of service-oriented SDN architecture, and led the research and development of a future network innovation experiment platform at BUPT,which has achieved network interconnection in the universities at Beijing, Nanjing, Xi’an, and Chongqing. In addition, he has developed the platform and related systems of SDN and a new generation of content distribution, which have been widely used at CCTV and China Unicom. He has published more than 100 academic papers, has 32 national technology invention patents,submitted 25 international standards proposals, and has published four individual monographs.

Gaogang Xie, is currently a full Professor and the Director of Network Technology Research Center at Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received his B.S.,M.S., and Ph.D. all from Hunan University and then joined ICT/CAS as assistant professor in 2002. He received FFCSA fellowship 2005-2006 with INRIA. His research interests include SDN-NFV System, Internet measurement, and future Internet architecture.He has published over 90 scientific papers in refereed journals and conferences and held 28 patents granted. He has received numerous research grants from the NSFC, MOST, NDRC, France Telecom R&D, China Mobile, Agilent, Huawei, ZTE etc. Parts of his researches have been successfully adopted by Huawei in the router, network storage, wireless core network, cloud platform,and also by PPTV, CSTNET.

Yunjie Liu, is a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering,and Director of the Science and Technology Committee of China Unicom. He took a leading role in the design, construction, and operation of the national public data network, computer Internet, and high-speed broadband, which have been instrumental for the construction of an information society in China. He also played the leading role in the design, construction, and operation of the China UniNet (a unified network platform for multiple services), which provides a feasible solution for network convergence. It has been a successful project implemented on a large scale in the evolution to the next-generation network (NGN). He has been a recipient of a first-grade National Prize for Progress in Science and Technology, and also the first-grade Ministerial Prize for Progress in Science and Technology. He has obtained two national invention patents and published 59 papers and 7 academic books.