What will the communications network look like in 2030?

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This article is reprinted from the WeChat public account "Network Optimization Mercenary", the author is in correspondence. To reprint this article, please contact the WeChat public account "Network Optimization Mercenary".

In the past 30 years, from 2G to 5G, from ADSL to 10GPON+Wi-Fi6, from circuit switching and all-IP to the all-cloud era, communication networks have broken through the boundaries of capabilities time and time again, achieving a ten-thousand-fold increase in network speed, unprecedentedly changing people's lifestyles and changing the world.

So what will the communication network look like in the next decade? Recently, Huawei released the "Intelligent World 2030" report. In the "Communication Network 2030" report released simultaneously, six key technical features were used to depict the overall picture of the communication network in 2030.

3D Ultra-Wide Network

Today's mobile communication network has formed a ground broadband network with full coverage of multiple scenarios through technologies such as Massive MIMO, uplink and downlink decoupling, and various macro stations, pole stations, micro stations and digital indoor deployment. It is based on such a network that the connection objects are expanding from people to everything, and the coverage scenarios are expanding from areas where people are active to production environments in all walks of life. However, this network is based on ground construction, and the vertical coverage range is generally limited to high-rise buildings in cities. It is difficult to achieve full coverage of remote areas such as mountainous areas, sea areas, grasslands, and deserts, and it is also difficult to provide broadband connections for drones, aircraft, and low-orbit spacecraft in the air. In this regard, extending the network from the ground to the air has become the consensus and development direction of the current industry.

Huawei's report predicts that in the next 10 years, as networked drones continue to become more popular, more urban manned aircraft will appear, and tens of thousands of low-orbit broadband satellites will operate in the sky. At the same time, as the intelligentization of industry and agriculture moves towards scenes such as the ocean, desert and sky, broadband connections need to be extended from the ground to the air, forming a three-dimensional ultra-wide network that interweaves the sky and the ground, providing services for the new life experience of mankind and the intelligence of all things in the industry. The three-dimensional ultra-wide network will be composed of small stations with a coverage radius of 100m, macro stations of 1~10km and low-orbit satellites of 300km~400km, providing users with continuous broadband experience of 10G, 1G and 100M respectively.

In the current 5G and F5G era, in order to meet the needs of new services such as high-definition video, VR/AR, online education, online office, and smart home, both fixed-line and mobile broadband have entered the gigabit era from the 100M era. Operators have launched "three gigabit" services, namely one gigabit for home broadband, one gigabit for home Wi-Fi, and one gigabit for mobile phones. On the one hand, 10GGPON+Wi-Fi6 technology, combined with FTTR networking, can provide a seamless gigabit experience for homes and businesses; on the other hand, the combination of larger spectrum bandwidth and Massive MIMO technology has helped 5G networks achieve a gigabit speed experience. But people's demand for communication networks is endless. How will the future network continue to evolve?

The report predicts that in the next 10 years, in order to support new experiences such as XR, naked-eye 3D, digital touch, digital smell, and autonomous driving cars will become the "third space" outside of homes and offices in the future, the network will evolve from today's "3 Gigabits" to "30 Gigabits", and build a new 10 Gigabit network capability that integrates living and traveling, providing users with a continuous 10 Gigabit broadband service experience from home to travel and then to the office. At the same time, as the broadband demand for home, personal and enterprise scenarios enters the 10 Gigabit era, in order to carry the ever-increasing data traffic, access, metropolitan, backbone, and data center networks will fully enter the T era.

Deterministic experience

As we all know, the biggest difference between the current 5G and 2/3/4G eras is that the past "one-size-fits-all" and "best-effort" network service model has been changed. Through network slicing, edge computing and other technologies, network bandwidth, latency, reliability, security and other SLA-guaranteed network capabilities can be provided, so as to provide customized and deterministic network services for diversified businesses in different industries. At present, Huawei has built a triple leading 5G differentiated service capability of high reliability, high security and high SLA through end-to-end integrated connection, cloud, edge, AI, automatic business orchestration, ubiquitous security and other capabilities, and has implemented a large number of 5GtoB commercial projects. However, in the next decade, due to the higher requirements of immersive and interactive experience for emerging businesses such as XR, naked-eye 3D, digital touch and digital smell, and as the network is more widely used in the core production control system of enterprises and all elements of enterprises go to the cloud, more stringent requirements are put forward for network capabilities such as latency, reliability and security. The network needs to further improve its deterministic service capabilities.

In this regard, the report points out that in the next ten years, the industry needs to continue to enhance the deterministic capabilities of the network from the following three aspects: First, based on the extensive deployment of distributed edge data centers, according to different business needs, a three-level latency circle of backbone, urban agglomeration, and city is built with users as the center to meet different business demands of 100ms, 10ms and 1ms, and can be directly scheduled in real time through the network layer according to business attributes to achieve green and efficient computing power for the whole society; second, it is necessary to continue to research and enhance end-to-end network slicing technology to create more adaptive logical "private networks" and services for vertical industries; third, based on AI intelligence, through intelligent prediction, active resource allocation, dynamic collaboration and other mechanisms, the reliability of cloud networks will be improved to 5 9s.

Smart Native

At present, as the network becomes more and more complex, network operation and maintenance becomes more and more difficult and costly; and as the business becomes more and more diversified, a large number of new applications have extremely high requirements for network latency, reliability and stability, and require faster service launch time. The traditional passive manual operation and maintenance operation mode has become increasingly difficult to meet the needs. It is in this context that it has become an industry consensus to promote the mutual empowerment of networks and AI to create an automatic, self-healing, and self-optimizing autonomous driving network. For example, Huawei released an autonomous driving network solution as early as 2019 to accelerate the digital transformation of the network by introducing artificial intelligence technology at the device layer, network layer, and cloud stack; this year, China Mobile proposed for the first time in the industry to achieve the quantitative goal of L4 autonomous driving network by 2025.

Looking to the future, the report points out that autonomous driving networks will continue to evolve from the current L2~L3 levels to L4/L5 advanced intelligence to enable new services and achieve the ultimate customer experience, fully automatic operation and maintenance, and the most efficient resource and energy utilization, and points out the future research direction of key technologies.

On the other hand, in order to generate more emerging applications and continuously improve the business experience, the integration of network with cloud, edge computing, AI, etc., allows computing power and intelligence to be injected into the entire network, and provides connections and computing power for diversified applications nearby and on demand, which has become a recognized development trend in the industry. Looking to the future, the report also proposes the concept of edge intelligence native, that is, the network will integrate the flexibility, openness and AI capabilities of cloud native to reconstruct the intelligent edge, which can support AI-based business perception capabilities, as well as Mesh interconnection and horizontal computing power scheduling.

Communication perception fusion

From the 1G to 5G era, communication and perception are independent of each other. In the 5.5G/6G era, as the communication spectrum expands to millimeter waves, terahertz, and visible light, it overlaps with the traditional perception spectrum, such as radar systems responsible for speed measurement and sensing imaging, making it possible to integrate communication and perception. As early as 2020, Huawei proposed the 5.5G vision. On the basis of the current 5G eMBB, mMTC, and URLLC scenarios, it expanded the three new scenarios of UCBC (uplink ultra-wideband), RTBC (real-time broadband interaction), and HCS (communication perception fusion) to meet the needs of the intelligent connection of all things in the next 5 to 10 years.

From the perspective of mobile communication networks, HCS can be applied to vehicle networking and autonomous driving scenarios of drones through Massive MIMO's beam scanning technology. In the future, as the wireless spectrum evolves towards millimeter waves and terahertz high frequencies, it can also be applied to smart cities, weather forecasting, environmental monitoring, medical imaging and other scenarios. At the same time, centimeter-level high-precision positioning will be achieved in the future to enable richer new indoor services.

In addition to the integration of communication and perception in the field of mobile networks, the report also looks forward to the future development trends and technical research directions of Wi-Fi perception, fiber optic sensing and LiDAR perception. In the next ten years, Wi-Fi perception can be applied to indoor, outdoor, in-vehicle, warehouse, cargo yard and other scenarios, providing high-precision positioning, posture/gesture recognition, breathing detection, emotion recognition, perimeter security and other functions; fiber optic sensing can be applied to energy, electricity, government, transportation and other industries, sensing changes in temperature, vibration, stress, providing fire monitoring and early warning, equipment/pipeline fault diagnosis, environment and facility stress monitoring, etc.; LiDAR perception can be applied to home and car scenarios, providing environmental space perception, high-precision positioning, posture and gesture recognition and other functions.

Safe and reliable

At present, ICT technologies such as network, AI, and cloud computing are penetrating into all walks of life to enable the digital and intelligent transformation of the entire industry and promote the expansion of the industry from consumer Internet to industrial Internet. In the entire system of industrial Internet, network is the foundation, platform is the core, and security is the guarantee. Security is one of the three core systems of industrial Internet. In the current development of 5GtoB, we also see that the industry generally attaches great importance to data security isolation and data privacy protection, especially in manufacturing, energy and other industries, because once a network security problem occurs, it will affect the continuous normal production and operation of the enterprise at the least, and affect the stable operation of the social economy at the worst.

In this regard, the report points out that, on the one hand, security itself is evolving from traditional centralized protection and plug-in architecture to a new network-native security architecture, and on the other hand, industrial interconnection will require the network to be not only secure but also trustworthy. Specifically, security and trustworthiness include six levels: component trustworthiness (chip/operating system), device security, connection security, management security, federation trustworthiness, and data trustworthiness. Only through the coordination of these six levels can a new end-to-end network security foundation be built.

Green and low carbon

At present, "carbon peak" and "carbon neutrality" have become the common goals of countries around the world. At the same time, ICT technologies such as communication networks, cloud, and AI are the key drivers for achieving the dual carbon goals. On the one hand, as network data traffic continues to grow exponentially, more power consumption and carbon emissions will inevitably be generated. Operators urgently need to use the latest network, AI, and cloud computing technologies to reduce network energy consumption and operating costs and fulfill their social responsibility to reduce carbon emissions; on the other hand, emerging technologies such as networks, AI, and cloud computing, as the infrastructure for the digital transformation of the industry, can also help all industries improve efficiency, reduce costs, save energy, and reduce emissions.

The report points out that for future communication networks to achieve green and low-carbon, the basic network, computing network and cloud network need to work together. First of all, the basic network itself needs to be green and low-carbon based on technologies such as all-optical networks, full-spectrum antennas, fully integrated core networks, minimalist protocols, and minimalist operations and maintenance. At the same time, the computing network should be used to achieve a reasonable layout of computing power and flexible scheduling of data, and the cloud network should be used to achieve multiple uses of one network, thereby improving resource utilization efficiency and further achieving network energy saving.

The report also predicts that, given that traditional electronic technology is about to encounter sustainable development bottlenecks such as distance and power consumption, the future integration of optoelectronic technologies will bring profound changes to the equipment architecture and energy efficiency of communication networks. For example, the introduction of optical coherent technology will increase the transmission distance of high-speed ports of data communication equipment, and lasers will be used instead of microwaves to achieve high-speed data transmission between earth-orbit satellites.