The research group for innovative network technology consists of Prof. ZHU Ming, Prof. ZHU Zuqing, Prof. TIAN Ye, and Prof. WANG Lei, who are from the School of Information Science and Technology and the School of Computer Science. Based on previous work of a CAS Strategic Guiding Research Program called “New-Generation Information Technology”, the group has been aiming at China’s great demand on key technologies of next-generation networks, and has got innovative achievements in the area of Next-Generation Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and ICN technologies. Until now, they have investigated a new SDN protocol, i.e., the protocol-oblivious forwarding (POF), designed and implemented the SDN controller, high-performance switches, and have constructed a wide-area network testbed (FuNet). In view of the above achievements, the research group came up with novel ideas of building the 5G communication network with POF-based network elements, and associated three other research institutes to beat other top research teams with their solid research backgrounds to win the fund support.

For some background regarding POF, it tries to decouple network protocols from the forwarding processing in SDN-based switches and to make the forwarding plane reconfigurable, programmable and future-proof. More specifically, POF enables system designers to define protocol stack and packet processing procedure in a much more flexible manner than what they can get from OpenFlow. Hence, POF can be leveraged to address the requirements on huge bandwidth, numerous connections and low latency in 5G networks properly.

The granting of the Project indicates that USTC has established leading position on domestic 5G network system research field, and our achievements on information science has reserved ranks in the national 5G standardization issues. Still, the USTC research group will devote itself to striving for state-of-the-art achievements through independent R&D along with promoting relative applications in the future.