China's national research project on future internet: Objectives, ideas, and progresses

The Internet today was designed in 1970s and is suffering various serious issues such as security, mobility and scalability. In order to deal with these issues, a national research project, supported by the prestigious National Basic Research Program (also called the "973 program") of China, was launched in May 2007. This project adopts a clean-slate approach and aims to design a novel future Internet that not only inherits the merit of the Internet today but also overcomes the drawbacks of the current Internet. In this paper, we make an overview of this project with a focus on its objectives, basic ideas, and progresses. Although this is a basic research project, its success will bring significant benefits to China as well as all other countries in the world.