The 23rd MPLS, SD & AI Net Network World Congress (also called the MPLS Forum) was successfully held in Paris. The congress is the world's highest-level third-party forum in the IP field, and its theme this year is "SRv6 Momentum". Senior experts and analysts from the SRv6 industry — covering device suppliers, operators, third-party independent test organizations, and standards organizations — delivered keynote speeches on SRv6 technical standards, industry cooperation, and commercial use progress, among others. In addition, they shared insights into the status quo, commercial deployment progress, and future development trends of SRv6.
SRv6, short for segment routing (SR) + IPv6, is a next-generation IP transport protocol. Utilizing existing IPv6 forwarding technology, SRv6 implements network programming through flexible IPv6 extension headers. SRv6 simplifies network protocol types, features good extensibility and programmability, meets diversified requirements of more new services, provides high reliability, and is especially suited to scenarios such as cross-domain interconnection, large-scale networking, service cloudification, and cloud-network synergy.
Zhenbin Li giving a speech on stage
On the first day of the congress, Zhenbin Li, Huawei chief IP standard representative and IETF IAB member, delivered a keynote speech titled "APN6 enables application and network collaboration". He said that the innovation of IPv6 Enhanced technologies oriented towards emerging services such as 5G and cloud is increasingly becoming a consensus in the industry. Innovative IPv6 Enhanced technologies, such as SRv6 and IP network slicing, have been deployed and applied on more than 100 sites worldwide, significantly enhancing the differentiated service capabilities of networks. He also introduced emerging technologies such as application-aware networking (APN) and computing-aware networking (CAN) — developed along with the trend of in-depth convergence between clouds and networks and between computing power and networks — as well as the development of the standards industry.
Xipeng Xiao giving a speech on stage
At the SRv6 session, Xipeng Xiao, head of CTO Office for Huawei West Europe, delivered a keynote speech titled "Migration to SRv6: Momentum, challenges & progress". He mentioned how IPv6 has made great progress in recent years and laid a solid foundation for SRv6. In addition, SRv6 standards have become mature, while SRv6 has been widely deployed across the globe. Now is the best time for leading operators and enterprises to adopt IPv6-only networks. SRv6 is a natural choice in the IPv6-only world, helping to promote IPv6-only deployment.
Weiqiang Cheng giving a speech online
Weiqiang Chen, principal architect of IP network from China Mobile, shared insights into the requirements, fundamentals, and progress of SRv6 header compression technology. In his speech, he introduced SRv6 compression requirements, SRv6 compression standardization progress at the IETF, and G-SRv6 industry progress, including interoperability tests, live network trials, and large-scale deployment. He explained that G-SRv6 solves the problem of high overhead of SRv6 headers while retaining the extensibility and programmability of SRv6, making it a key feature to accelerate large-scale SRv6 deployment.
With joint efforts of upstream and downstream industry chains, it is widely agreed that SRv6, a successor of MPLS, will be the next-generation core protocol of IP networks and will be deployed on a large scare. In the future, SRv6-based service innovation will fully unlock the value of connections and promote the digital development of industries.
