Huawei's Chu Tao: Focusing on all-optical autonomous driving networks to accelerate high-quality business development

[Beijing, China, September 27] Today, the 2022 China Cloud Network Intelligent Connection Conference was held in Beijing. Operators, Internet service providers, equipment vendors, international organizations, scientific research institutions and other parties from all over the world discussed hot topics such as self-intelligent networks and AI+. At the meeting, Chu Tao, President of Huawei NCE Optical Network, delivered a keynote speech entitled "Focusing on all-optical autonomous driving networks to accelerate high-quality business development." Chu Tao said that with the booming development of digitalization today, self-intelligent all-optical networks will surely become the core foundation for the digital transformation of homes and various industries.

Under the new thinking, new technology and new model brought by the new wave of digitalization, various technical systems, organizational structures, business models and industrial forms have been reconstructed, and digital transformation is booming, and this is just the starting point of great changes. As the transformation process deepens, how to build a more reliable, efficient and high-quality all-optical network will become the key. The traditional network operation and maintenance model based on "manual-based and machine-assisted" is inefficient and can no longer meet the needs of all-optical network business development. Therefore, gradually driving the all-optical network towards self-intelligence and continuously improving the level of automation and intelligence can provide effective guarantee for high-quality business experience.

Chu Tao mentioned that Huawei's all-optical autonomous driving network solution closely matches development needs, focusing on one network and three industries (all-optical basic network; quality broadband, quality dedicated line, and quality transportation capacity), with the iMaster NCE intelligent management and control system as the core, effectively helping to improve the four major capabilities of the network and business: integrated perception capability, configuration automation capability, fault self-healing capability, and performance risk problem handling capability. In terms of network, the digital all-optical network lights up "dumb resources", enables "three selfs" network operation and maintenance of self-configuration, self-repair, and self-optimization, and builds an efficient, secure, and green all-optical foundation. In terms of business, intelligence improves quality, enables zero waiting, zero contact, and zero failure "three zero" quality business experience, helps the refined operation from bandwidth operation to home broadband experience, from selling bandwidth on dedicated lines to quality operation based on business SLA, and releases unlimited computing power by determining transportation capacity.

Strengthening the all-optical foundation with digitalization

For the operation and maintenance of optical fiber and cable, the all-optical autonomous driving network solution provides several digital capabilities. First, the system can automatically identify the risk of optical fiber co-cable based on the intelligent sensors built into the optical network elements. Secondly, iMaster NCE makes the health status of optical fibers and OCh channels visible, and predicts slow-changing faults in advance for proactive rectification. At the same time, the eOTDR+GIS solution can be used to quickly and accurately locate optical fiber faults. In addition, in terms of ODN resource management, the system can automatically enter ODN resources and restore topology through mobile phone APP scanning and image intelligent recognition. It can also automatically restore the ODN topology, and automatically complete ODN network acceptance and meter-level fault location.

At the same time, by focusing on key issues in the planning, maintenance, and optimization of optical networks, the solution can improve operation and maintenance efficiency and ensure the reliability of the entire optical network. In the planning stage, the iMaster NCE optical network resource assurance solution achieves zero resource conflicts and "zero" planning rework through the same source of planning/deployment/existing network data, automatic resource verification, and online resource planning and design. In the maintenance stage, the "three-level alarm intelligent compression" algorithm of alarm noise reduction, cluster analysis, and root cause alarm identification has changed the alarm management mode. In the optimization stage, the iMaster NCE availability assurance solution, on the one hand, evaluates and analyzes the availability, monitors in real time, and realizes automatic warning of over-limit. On the other hand, it automatically gives optimization suggestions for the discovered availability risks to reduce the risk of default and ensure service quality.

Driving new growth in home broadband business with high-quality broadband

Currently, since traditional non-intelligent optical modems and user-purchased Wi-Fi routers cannot collect Wi-Fi performance data, operators can only identify about 20% of home Wi-Fi problems. In addition, due to the lack of experience perception and guarantee methods for home broadband applications, poor experience quality problems are mainly solved through complaints, and the fault closure loop relies on manual visits, which is time-consuming and inefficient.

In this regard, by introducing the AEC board on the OLT, traffic characteristics and application KPI data are perceived in real time, and home broadband problems including weak home Wi-Fi coverage and application experience are fully identified. At the same time, the system provides five-segment precise demarcation to support the distinction between problems on the ODN network and the OLT side, and through the self-developed spatiotemporal correlation intelligent diagnosis algorithm, it can quickly find more than 30 root causes of poor home broadband experience. Identified non-hardware problems will not require on-site repair. iMaster NCE will dynamically optimize Wi-Fi for each terminal to create the best network experience. In addition, in-depth insight analysis of the four dimensions of home broadband "terminal capabilities, home networking, experience quality, and experience bottlenecks" can effectively help identify business opportunities for potential users such as FTTR networking and gigabit, and greatly improve the marketing success rate.

In response to FTTR, a new innovation in home broadband services, Huawei has provided a one-stop solution for planning, inspection, maintenance, and optimization. In the network planning stage, installation and maintenance personnel can use the Wi-Fi coverage heat map simulation function in the APP to intuitively understand the Wi-Fi coverage effect and provide professional network planning. In the acceptance stage, through an integrated intelligent acceptance tool, more than 10 types of broadband key performance indicators including networking, rate, latency, and roaming are inspected and an acceptance report is automatically generated to ensure that standardized networking is successful once. In the network maintenance stage, iMaster NCE provides intelligent diagnosis capabilities, supports more than 60 root cause identifications, realizes imperceptible tuning of network degradation, and reshapes the operation and maintenance experience. In addition, each user can receive an exclusive experience report including four dimensions: terminal quantity, duration statistics, traffic ranking, and network quality, so as to truly perceive the FTTR network effect.

Generate new revenue from private line services with quality commitment

In recent years, the optical private line business of the three major domestic operators has maintained a revenue growth of more than 10%. Private line service SLA guarantees and quality commitments have always been key factors in the growth of private line revenue. With long-term technological innovation in the OTN field and a deep understanding of the demands of enterprise private lines, the all-optical autonomous driving network provides a private line service SLA guarantee solution covering the entire life cycle of pre-sales, sales, and after-sales, helping to improve the quality and revenue of private line services.

Before sales, the latency map function with real microsecond-level measurement ensures that latency is visible, manageable, and committed, meeting the differentiated sales demands of services. During sales, it supports multi-factor, multi-strategy intelligent routing, and automatically completes service configuration end-to-end. After sales, it provides dedicated line SLA limit warnings and availability optimization recommendations to provide guaranteed SLA for services.

Open up a new situation of resource matching with high-quality transportation capacity

Computing power represented by cloud, supercomputing and AI intelligent computing is becoming a basic requirement of digital economic life, just like water and electricity. For example, meteorological, genetic, and pharmaceutical businesses require supercomputing/AI capabilities; video, picture, and image rendering rely on computing power. These applications require unified scheduling of computing power and transportation capacity, as well as the on-demand construction of all-optical network "transportation capacity". iMaster NCE provides a capacity map solution, which enables on-demand construction of services through digitalization of transportation capacity and agile computing capabilities, providing the best transportation capacity for all industries.

Among them, the digitalization of transportation capacity enables visualization of indicators such as bandwidth, latency, reliability, energy consumption, and utilization, as well as unified topology presentation and real-time monitoring of "computing + network". Agile computing capacity can automatically recommend the optimal computing power node for computing power applications with fixed sources and multiple destinations. In addition, the multi-factor balancing algorithm can match the best transportation capacity resources and provide the best transportation capacity resources for cloud-optical network integration.

At the same time, the closed-loop automation of network operation and maintenance and business operations cannot be separated from the open capabilities of the all-optical network and its integration with the O/B domain system. As the next-generation northbound network, IETF ACTN further accelerates the automation of optical networks with its key features of minimal integration, comprehensive capabilities, and continuous evolution. In addition, Huawei is also actively cooperating with major relevant standard organizations such as TMF, CCSA, ETSI, and IETF to continuously contribute to the industry vision, use case standards, classification standards, evaluation standards, and interface specifications of self-intelligent networks.

Chu Tao concluded that the all-optical autonomous driving network solution has been widely used in commercial applications at home and abroad with remarkable results, but the realization of a fully autonomous all-optical self-intelligent network still requires the concerted efforts of all parties and continuous practical exploration. In the future, Huawei will continue to work hand in hand with industry partners to jointly innovate, move forward steadily on the road of network autonomy, bring quality connections to every home and every enterprise, and build a fully connected intelligent world together.