Computer Networks research in Tsinghua University has existed for over 30 years. Computer Networks is the study of networking core equipment, advanced network infrastructure and key technologies in the next-generation Internet. It covers a wide range of fields from computer science to communication theory, and it impacts various applications and industrial design disciplines which are especially closely related to Internet significant projects and applications. We aim to solve the fundamental problems during the development of the Internet in order to make significant contribution to the development of the global Internet and advance the research and construction of the next generation Internet in certain important fields.

Our research in computer networks mainly includes the following 5 directions: network routing and switching architecture, advanced network infrastructure, source IP address validation, transition from IPv4 to IPv6, and computer system performance evaluation. The area has been funded by many high-level projects belonging to the 973 Program, 863 Program, National Science Foundation of China, China Next-Generation Internet (CNGI), and international cooperation projects. Particularly, we are leading a key CNGI project in which 100 research universities participate, and the total funding is about 400 million RMB. Besides, we have been supported by National Basic Research 973 Program two consecutive times (2003-2008 and 2009-2013 respectively) in fundamental theoretical research of new generation Internet architecture, with funding totaling about 47 million RMB. We have also published a large number of high-quality papers in top journals and conferences such as ACM SIGCOMM, IEEE INFOCOM, IEEE Internet Computing, and ACM/IEEE Transactions on Networking, among which one of our papers was nominated as the best paper of ACM Multimedia 2009. The National Engineering Laboratory for Next Generation Internet Core Network was set up in Tsinghua University in 2009.

We led the development of the China Education and Research Network (CERNET) which we designed and developed to be the first Internet backbone network in China. Created to establish a nation-wide advanced network infrastructure to support education and research among universities, CERNET has since become the world’s largest national academic network. CERNET also has played an important role in driving Internet development in China and has had a significant impact on the Internet worldwide.

Moreover, a large number of our innovations have led to patents. Large-scale experiments of our proposed novel technologies have also been carried out and even deployed, based on which we have also obtained national scientific and technological progress awards. For example, we developed an IPv6 core router which won the 2004 Major Technological Invention Prize awarded by the Ministry of Information Industry. The overall technological innovation has won the 2nd class prize of 2005 national scientific & technological progress award, and has largely deployed in CNGI demonstration project. We, along with other 20 universities in China, constructed the largest core network of China Next Generation Internet Demonstration Project CNGI-CERNET2 and the domestic/international exchange point CNGI-6IX. We put forward and built the largest pure IPv6 backbone in the world. It breaks through a series of key technical problems and was rated as “Top Ten Scientific and Technological Progress of China” twice, in 2004 and 2006, respectively. This project also obtained the 2nd class prize of the National Scientific and Technological Progress Award in 2007. The IPv4/IPv6 transition technologies, addressing validation architecture and its key technologies such as 4over6 have not only been published as RFCs of the IETF International Standard, but also will be deployed in the next generation Internet, solving interoperability, evolution, safety, reliability, and other problems. Focused on the fundamental research on performance evaluation of computer network and QoS Control, we have published 15 representative papers in top publications such as IEEE Transactions on Computers and IEEE INFOCOM, and been nominated as the 1st class prize of the National Scientific and Technological Progress Award, Natural Science Category by the Ministry of Education in 2005.