The First Decade of Computing and Network Convergence

The past few years have witnessed an exciting journey from cloud-network convergence to Computing and Network Convergence (CNC) across major telcos worldwide. The pandemic in the past 3 years has further accelerated the digital transformation for verticals, which present high demands on both connectivity and computing. This paper reviews the development progression of CNC by Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) and surveys major telco's strategies evolving from cloud-network convergence to CNC. The authors propose a new scheme of CNC to operate and manage CNC infrastructure and services. In particular, CNC Brain, as the core component of CNC, is proposed to collaborate, orchestrate, schedule, and allocate computing resources across cloud-edge-end through networks to serve any computing task anywhere and anytime. The authors also design a novel algorithm portfolio for CNC Brain to leverage least cost of CNC resources and optimal routes to meet the given service requirements of CNC. A CNC testbed is implemented with full CNC functionalities and experiments are illustrated for verification of the CNC scheme. The paper also forward looks at the roadmap with the critical milestones of CNC for the first decade.