Rethinking the IP Framework

The industrial digitalization is creating a paradigm shift from human-oriented communication to machine-oriented communication, where the high throughput of data transmission is not the highest priority anymore. The high bandwidth may not be able to solve the low-latency requirement from many emerging time-critical applications. Those applications demand the deterministic transmission and high security as essential and must-have network capabilities to guarantee the in-time and on-time packet delivery. Although the Internet Protocol (IP) that was invented in 1969 as the foundation of the Internet has achieved unprecedented success for the past 50 years, it is hard to support aforementioned new network capabilities intuitively. For instance, the host-oriented communication via fixed-length address and predetermined packet semantics might not be an ideal design to interconnect high-dynamic and resource-constraint networks. The statistical multiplexing and best effort oriented network transmission cannot guarantee bandwidth, latency, jitter, and loss ratio, which are even more strictly required in machine-to-machine communication. Therefore, we need to revisit the foundation of the Internet in order to look for a holistic solution to meet the emerging requirements. It is time to break the IP ossification and to enhance the network layer with extra capabilities. This chapter contains the following sections. An introduction followed by emerging applications and derived network requirements and challenges. Then the state of the art and standardization landscape will be listed. Afterward a new IP framework concept and design consideration will be depicted with its potential market and business value. Finally, a conclusion will be made.