The "China Mobile G-SRv6 Technical White Paper" aims to promote the innovative technical solution for G-SRv6 header compression and optimization proposed by China Mobile. At the same time, it shares networking deployment applications and interoperability practices, hoping to deploy G-SRv6 related technologies, Products and solutions provide references and guidelines.
This is one of the strategies of the State Council on building a network power to accelerate the large-scale deployment of IPv6. It is foreseeable that the network will accelerate into the new era of IPv6.
Based on IPv6 basic technology and SR (Segment Routing) implementation, SRv6 supports network protocol simplification, capability opening and programmable, so as to flexibly meet the needs of emerging services such as 5G, cloud network collaboration, and ubiquitous connectivity. SRv6 represents an important development direction based on IPv6 technology as a basic network, and will become the core technology of a new generation of bearer networks.
Although the existing SRv6 has many of the above advantages, the disadvantages are also obvious. The main disadvantage is that SRv6 uses 128 bits as its label. When the number of label layers increases, the overhead of the message header is too large, which leads to the main scenarios of operators' applications, such as multi-hop strict path TE and SFC, which makes it difficult to deploy SRv6. How to effectively compress the overhead of SRv6 message headers has become a decisive factor for large-scale commercial use of SRv6, and is also a hot research topic at home and abroad.
China Mobile takes the lead and cooperates with industry partners to innovate and propose a G-SRv6 header compression optimization solution. G-SRv6 uses innovative technologies such as compressed redundant prefixes, two-dimensional pointer positioning, G-SID splicing, and multiple SID mixing. Under the premise of supporting all the features of the existing SRv6, the header overhead can be compressed by 4 times, which solves the problem. There are technical problems such as low SRv6 carrying efficiency, high hardware requirements, and inability to upgrade existing networks, which cleared the way for large-scale commercial use of SRv6.
In order to promote the improvement of G-SRv6 technology and industry support, China Mobile organized multiple rounds of multi-manufacturer interconnection testing, which effectively promoted the improvement of the industry chain. Currently, Huawei, ZTE, Xinhua 3, Ruijie, Broadcom, Intel, Centec, Si Bolun and other domestic and foreign equipment manufacturers, chip manufacturers, and test instrument vendors have completed the interconnection testing of the forwarding plane, which indicates that the feasibility of the G-SRv6 technical solution has been verified and an industry consensus has been reached. China Mobile will also conduct full network interoperability tests and existing network trials during the year to promote the commercial process.
At the same time, China Mobile and industry partners actively promote the SRv6 header compression standardization process, and promote the IETF to establish an SRv6 header compression design group, with experts from China Mobile Research Institute serving as the chairman of the group. In the future, China Mobile will continue to unite all parties in the industry, actively promote technological improvement, and accelerate the process of international and domestic standardization.