All-service intelligent solutions will enable carriers to power 5G vertical industries, the cloud migration of enterprises, and next-gen services like cloud VR. Find out how.
By Chen Banghua, Vice President, Data Communication Product Line, Huawei
The predecessor of today's Internet, ARPANET, originally used Network Control Protocol (NCP). But as more computers connected to networks, it became harder for source computers to locate target computers on complex networks. So, ARPANET replaced NCP with TCP/IP on January 1, 1983, paving the way to the Internet. In 1997, Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) based on IP technology was created to meet reliability requirements and improve the forwarding efficiency of carrier networks, marking the start of the wide adoption of IP technology on carrier networks.
The first generation, the Internet era, arrived with the new millennium. Internet services were carried over IP, the main service types were office and home Internet access such as email and telephony, bandwidth requirements were low, and network-side interfaces were mainly GE and 10GE. Service experience requirements could be met if the network was reachable and network O&M was mainly command-based.
2008 marked the beginning of the second generation – the triple-play era. As 4K and mobile video services began to emerge, bandwidth requirements increased rapidly and 10GE and 100GE interfaces were mainly adopted on the network side. The quality of high-priority services, like IPTV, could be guaranteed through simple QoS. Simple tools were used for basic O&M automation.
The third generation, the all-service intelligent era, began in 2020. GSMA expects 170 carriers to commercially deploy 5G by 2020, and with 5G we will see new applications such as cloud VR. At the same time, enterprise cloudification will become the norm, with more than 85 percent of enterprise applications globally expected to be deployed on the cloud by 2025.
For new services such as cloud VR, 5G for vertical industries, and enterprise cloudification, carriers expect to simplify network construction and reduce costs by using one network to carry all services. Moreover, key services, such as 5G B2B, will require strict SLA assurance. And network automation and intelligent O&M will become increasingly important.
New requirements of the intelligent all-service era
Tenfold bandwidth growth: Transporting services like 5G, gigabit home broadband, and cloud private lines is driving explosive traffic growth. Compared with video services in the 4G era, new services that offer immersive experiences, such as cloud VR/AR, require more than 10 times the bandwidth. In South Korea for example, the bandwidth of the typical Cloud VR/AR service is more than 80 Mbps, and these services can increase ARPU by 300 percent. At the same time, home broadband is shifting from 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps, with 234 carriers in 57 countries having launched 1 Gbps broadband services. In addition to bandwidth growth, key services, such as 5G B2B services, require stable bandwidth. For example, in remote first-responder healthcare scenarios, stable bandwidth of at least 50 Mbps is required to transmit real-time HD images of patients in ambulances to hospitals.
Experience guarantees: As 5G enables numerous industries and allows millions of enterprises to move to cloud, IP networks need to meet SLA requirements such as stable latency assurance and fast TTM. These SLA requirements may be stipulated in the contracts signed between carriers and enterprises, and therefore an SLA commitment is a necessity. In smart grid transport scenarios, for example, to ensure uninterrupted power supply and shorten the accident isolation time to milliseconds in scenarios with high power supply requirements, E2E network latency can’t exceed 15 ms. From the perspective of enterprise cloudification, cloud services are inherently agile and can be deployed within minutes, requiring IP networks to move with the cloud and support fast service provisioning.
Intelligent O&M: 5G vertical industries have stricter requirements on network reliability. In the financial services industry, for example, any interruption to securities trading lasting more than 30 minutes must be reported to the CSRC. This means that network faults must be quickly located and rectified. For enterprise cloudification, the flexible deployment of complex cloud services requires IP networks to support intelligent O&M, real-time visualization of network quality, and quick fault location.
Huawei's intelligent IP network solution opens up the all-service intelligent era
To meet the requirements of the all-service intelligent era, Huawei has taken the lead in deploying big data analytics, AI, and next-gen protocols on IP networks, helping customers build IP networks with super capacity, intelligent experience, and autonomous driving capabilities. . Huawei's intelligent IP network solution leverages the NetEngine series of routers and provides the industry's first E2E 400GE, which enables carriers to build a base network at optimal cost per bit. The solution uses FlexE-based network slicing to guarantee and flexibly allocate bandwidth for key services. With SRv6 technology that’s a year ahead of the industry average, the solution provides intelligent experience, enabling the fast provisioning of services such as enterprise cloudification and committed latency for key services. Combined with iMaster network cloud engine (NCE), the industry's first platform with integrated management, control, and analysis, and the iFIT solution, it supports intelligent O&M functions like fast fault location and real-time network optimization.
Super capacity: E2E 400GE and FlexE-based network slicing
All-service transport brings continuous growth to telecom network traffic and increases the bandwidth cost for carriers. As such, it’s vital to reduce cost per bit while boosting network capacity. 400GE will replace 100GE as a cost effective, next-generation networking technology, with PAM4 encoding doubling the efficiency of transmission and achieving optimal cost per bit.
To meet future traffic growth requirements, Huawei has launched the industry's first E2E 400GE solution covering data centers and the access aggregation, metro aggregation, metro core, and national backbone layers. Huawei is the primary contributor to 400GE standardization and the only vendor that can provide 10, 40, and 80 km full-distance 400GE optical modules. In February 2019, Huawei launched the industry's first commercial 400GE.
In the same way that traffic congestion may occur regardless of how wide a road is, traditional IP networks can fail to guarantee bandwidth for key services even if network capacity is high. This is because all services share bandwidth resources and preempt each other in case of traffic bursts. Huawei is the first in the industry to propose and develop FlexE-based network slicing, which is similar to a dedicated lane on the road — it implements hard bandwidth isolation between different service traffic on the ultra-broadband network. This solution provides 100-percent committed bandwidth for industry scenarios such as 5G telemedicine, manufacturing networks, and carrier IP private lines. Bandwidth slices can flexibly adjust to adapt to service changes. Huawei's FlexE-based network slicing technology is five times more fine-grained than the industry average, supporting more vertical industries and finer bandwidth scheduling.
Intelligent experience with SRv6
In the 5G and cloud era, different services have different SLA requirements and networks must be able to provide connections based on SLAs. On traditional networks, service provisioning is implemented through static configuration, so network resources cannot be configured in real time based on service intent. Using SRv6 technology, Huawei's intelligent IP network solution can intelligently select the optimal path and adjust it in real time based on service intent and network congestion status to continuously provide the optimal connection experience. SRv6 can select an optimal low-latency path for latency-sensitive services, such as smart grids, to ensure committed latency.
The intelligent IP network solution uses SRv6 to accelerate service provisioning to within minutes, implement cloud-network synergy and one-hop access to the cloud, and support 50-ms protection switching across 100 percent of all topology-independent scenarios, ensuring high service reliability. As the largest contributor to SRv6 standards, Huawei has participated in formulating more than 59 percent of all SRv6 standards. To date, more than 20 carriers have deployed SRv6.
Autonomous driving: iMaster NCE powers full-lifecycle intelligent O&M
iMaster NCE deployed in the intelligent IP network solution provides customers with full-lifecycle intelligent O&M covering network planning, construction, maintenance, and optimization, and helps them transform their networks into autonomous driving IP networks.
As network scale and complexity increase, passive maintenance based on subscriber complaints cannot meet O&M requirements. However, intelligent IP networks can use iFIT technology to detect network status in real time and quickly identify network faults or potential risks. Operators can also accurately identify root causes and automatically rectify faults through model matching, minimizing or even preventing experience degradation.
Huawei has proposed a five-level autonomous driving network evolution standard to help upstream and downstream industries explore the evolutionary path of autonomous driving networks. Currently, Huawei is introducing AI and other technologies to evolve IP networks into autonomous driving networks. For example, AI-based analysis on more than 80,000 KPIs using the iMaster NCE enables real-time health checks on routers so faults can be predicted before they occur. To date, more than 100 carriers worldwide have commercially deployed iMaster NCE and in 2019, the solution won the highest evaluation from GlobalData, making it the only market leader in the WAN controller field.
Intelligent IP enables 5G and enterprise cloud migration
Huawei has successfully implemented smart healthcare, smart grid, and smart port solutions in more than 30 industries. For example, in 2019, Huawei helped China Mobile launch the world's first 5G smart healthcare solution for three scenarios: inside, outside, and between hospitals. The solution mainly covers emergency rescue, remote consultation, and remote B-mode ultrasound, ensuring the experience of medical services. In terms of cloud private lines, Huawei has helped carriers quickly migrate services to cloud and provide high-quality experience for more than 40 industries, including government and enterprise, education, tax, and finance.
As a world-leading provider of intelligent IP network solutions, Huawei has invested heavily in R&D for more than two decades. Huawei's router products and solutions have been deployed in more than 140 countries and regions, ranking top in global market share for two consecutive years. In the 5G and cloud era, intelligent IP networks featuring super capacity, intelligent experience, and autonomous driving capabilities will underpin the development of data communication networks over the next 10 years. Huawei believes that the wide-scale commercial use of intelligent IP networks will begin in 2020.
Based on customer centricity and continuous innovation, Huawei will continue creating value for customers with intelligent IP networks.
