According to statistics, Internet has become the most important information infrastructure of human society these days, accounting for 80% of human information exchange, and providing great strategic significance for social progress, economic development and national security. However, Internet technology invented more than 30 years ago cannot always satisfy its developmental requirement and support of new applications. The existing main technical challenges are: scalability, security, high performance, timeliness, mobility and ease of management. The recent studies show that it is difficult to solve the major technical challenges in the current IPv4 Internet. IPv6 builds a new platform to address the important technical challenges faced by Internet as well as the development of new applications.
The fundamental research of Internet and next-generation Internet has acquired people's high attention gradually. The science foundations and high-tech research projects of developed countries have all funded the project of Internet and next-generation Internet. In recent years, Chinese government has attached great importance to the new-generation Internet research, and listed it in the "Medium and Long-term National Science and Technology Development Planning". With the support of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, 973 plans, 863 plans, and national high-tech industrialization plans, Chinese scientific and technological personnel have started the in-depth study of the new-generation Internet, and are actively solving the major theoretical and technical challenges faced by Internet, and striving to carry out new generation Internet research and technological innovation.
Internet architecture is a technological science describing compositions and functions as well as their mutual relations and fundamental laws among different levels of Internet. It is the description of basic forms and the core of the Internet technology. The fundamental research of Internet architecture is an important component of Internet. Practice has proved that to solve the main technological challenge of the new-generation Internet needs a theoretical foundation of architecture and the scientific-proof to support. 973 Project "Research of Future Internet Architecture" has made preliminary findings in exploring the fundamental issues of new generation Internet architecture. This special issue focuses on the results of these studies and the next step of research.
Source: Science in China Press