Some thoughts on the transformation of information and communication technologies

Summary form only given. In the beginning of the second decade of this century, the demand on broadband, mobile and ubiquitous application continues to increase. The proportion of number of 3G subscribers to total mobile subscribers is 7.5% up to April 2011, and 49.5% in new increased mobile subscribers during Jan to Apr 2011 in China. Global mobile data traffic in 2010 (237 PB/month) was over three times greater than the total global Internet traffic in 2000 (75 PB/month). Global mobile data traffic first exceeded voice in December 2009 and 1.5 times voice in Q2´2010. Internet of Things and ubiquitous network applications will also aggravate demand on bandwidth .For example, During the Shanghai World Expo 2010, 10,000 security cameras were installed on buses, trucks, and emergency vehicles. When live monitoring is needed, video is transmitted over the mobile network at 2 frames per second. If each frame is 0.5 MB, then an hour of this video generates 3.6 GB. If half of these vehicles transmitted 2 minutes of video over the course of a day, this would generate 18 Peta-bytes of mobile data traffic of a month, more that total global mobile data traffic in 2007. The technology progress begins to encounter bottleneck despite the optimistic market forecasts. Network development faced to some challenges, for example, scalability, ubiquitous, power consumption, security, Quality of Service, governance, etc. Firstly, the increased speed of Internet traffic exceeds Moore´s law. Only a true optical layer can accommodate such traffic growth, but optical layer switching lack granulation. Core router capacity is also unable to keep pace with user traffic growth. ICANN announces that IPv4 addresses bank was sold out in Feb, 2011. Only 0.6 IPv4 address is available per user on average in China. Transition to IPv6 is inevitable. But few terminals currently in use support IPv6, and the prospect of kill application is not yet good enough for the operators and ICP to make up their m- - inds. Frequency spectrum resource is another importance challenge. In some large cities of China, the mobile communications penetration rate is over 90%. The larger number of users accessing the mobile Internet and using broadband services as 3G and LTE also adds to the burden upon urban mobile frequency spectrum. 4G cellular compared to 2G cellular needs more small cells interconnected with each other. The challenge for lower carbon on network equipments must be also considered. Energy consumption of mobile networks is growing much faster than ICT on the whole as rapid traffic growth and build-up of broadband coverage. The development of the Internet is a typical example that engineering technology walks ahead of theory, but the contin uous development of the Internet needs the theoretical support and experimental Validation. Both evolution and revolution schemes for Next Generation Internet all are worth searching well. Construction of a pure IPv6 large scale Internet core network and IPv6 source address validation mechanism for the first time in Chinese Next Generation Internet project. China Mobile has launched the TD-LTE trial in 2010 Shanghai World Expo. MIIT approved to initiate TD-LTE scale tech trial in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Xiamen, and demonstration network construction in Bei jing at end of 2010. Each city undertaking scale tech-trial will installed 200 TD-LTE base stations. Mobile communica tions will continually develop from LTE to 4G. Combining TDMA/FDMA/SDMA technologies have been used by air interface of 4G mobile system. Technologies space of physical layer will be limited for future improvement on spectrum efficiency and peak data rate. It is necessary to explore optimization of cross layers, cognitive radio and offloading to WLAN technologies etc. In a word, it will be difficult to evolve ICT along the existing technical route given the constraints imposed by frequency spectrum resources and power consumption etc.