As a leading global ICT infrastructure provider, Huawei provides leading innovative optical communication technologies and solutions for global carriers and various industries. In an exclusive interview with Telecom Review, Kim Jin, Vice President of Huawei Optical Business Product Line, shares details on the company’s proposed all-optical three-phase target network architecture for striding to F5.5G.
“We hope that the target network definition can help global carriers adapt to their network development phases and aim at future network development to accelerate positive business cycles, thereby achieving business success,” explained Jin.
As we all know, the prosperity of the optical communication industry is inseparable from the rapid development of internet services. There are different hot services in different network development phases, that drive the increase of new traffic and finally promote the rapid development of all-optical networks. From the perspective of network development history, video, experience, and intelligence drive sustainable network development.
Phase 1: Achieve All-Optical Coverage and 100 Mbps Home Bandwidth
Starting off with the first phase, Jin mentioned that with the continuous improvement of video resolution and the rapid popularization of video interaction and immersive XR, the bandwidth needs to be upgraded from 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps and Gbps.
With the network goal of achieving all-optical coverage and 100 Mbps home bandwidth, carriers need to do the following: replace copper lines and cables with optical fibers, introduce fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), gradually upgrade to 10G PON, deploy OTN downward to metro networks and build 3D-mesh 400G ready backbone networks. All of these will support non-blocking bandwidth and zero video lagging.
Jin presented Huawei’s technological innovations in this phase, which include FlexPON+, DQ ODN and AirPON.
- Huawei FlexPON+ provides the PON turbo solution, which improves PON data payload from 8.6 Gbps to 10 Gbps. Meanwhile, the dual class D module increases 10G PON port density from 16 to 32, and coverage by 8 km.
- Huawei DQ ODN with fiber iris and intelligent analysis algorithm has achieved 95% resource identification accuracy. Therefore, link faults can be located within 15 minutes without site visit. This can help carriers digitalize their ODN networks and reduce OPEX.
- Huawei AirPON all-outdoor innovative solution provides flexible and low-cost deployment capabilities, and together with FlexPON+ and fiber Iris, it forms a fast and low-cost network construction solution to help customers quickly realize a positive business cycle in FTTH services.
Phase 2: Achieve E2E All-Optical Connections and 1 Gbps to Rooms
Jin continued that in the second phase, home digital applications are continuously enriched, and the number of smart terminal connections increases by dozens of times.
“Traffic extends from living rooms to bedrooms, study rooms and kitchens. In addition, interaction dimensions are increasing, from planar audio and video to immersive interaction, and even to electronic tactile and olfactory. In the future, all these pose higher requirements on network coverage, bandwidth and latency,” expounded Jin.
In this phase, users are willing to pay for better home network coverage and network connection experiences. Hence, end-to-end (E2E) service experience assurance becomes the key.
In line with this, carriers need to upgrade their 10G PONs to fully deliver gigabit services; introduce FTTR to extend optical fibers to rooms; deploy 10G PON in a large scale; move metro 100G to Cos; and implement ultra-broadband non-blocking backbone 400G to achieve non-blocking ultra-high speed network.
Compared to the previous phase, typical technological innovations in this phase are FTTR based on a C-WAN architecture, metro Alps-WDM and intelligent network management and control system.
- Huawei FTTR C-WAN 1.5 architecture enhances centralized management and optimization capabilities, doubles the number of concurrent IoT connections to 256, and achieves zero packet loss in roaming. In addition, Wi-Fi 6 is upgraded to Wi-Fi 7, increasing the access rate to 3 Gbps and reducing the latency by 30%.
- For metro pooling WDM, the new mini WSS of Huawei Alps-WDM supports multi-degree CO networking and is compatible with existing OTN networks. The comprehensive construction CAPEX can be further reduced by 20%. The newly-available fgOTN supports encapsulation and grooming at a granularity of 10 Mbps, meeting the requirements of multiple service granularities on metro networks. In addition, the number of connections increases by 100 times, and the site latency decreases by 30%.
- For the intelligent network management and control system, the 5D marketing insight of Huawei premium broadband increases the precision marketing success rate from 3 to 10%, while time-space correlation analysis shortens the troubleshooting duration from hours to minutes, and supports third-party ONT and AP management. Transport digital map also provides multi-layer visualization from optical fibers to SLA, and shortens the TTM from weeks to days and guarantees 99.999% availability. Root cause analysis can also combine alarms with the same source. Moreover, one fault triggers only one maintenance requirement, achieving "one fault one ticket". These upgrades will support the industry to stride to ADN Level 4 steadily.
Phase 3: All-Optical Computing for 10 Gbps Everywhere
In the third and final phase, Jin pointed out that AI increases the scale of content production by a thousand times while intelligent applications accelerate the intelligent transformation of industries.
“Traffic surges, massive data migrates to the cloud and network connections enter production scenarios. Thus, the network needs to be upgraded to computing-centric and bus-level connection capabilities,” Jin conveyed.
Bus-level connection capability is described as the relationship between computing power, networks and users, and is similar to that between computer CPU, buses and peripherals. Bus-level connection capabilities include all-optical home buses and all-optical cloud buses.
The FTTR-based all-optical home bus needs to support connect-and-use of end IoT devices, integrate connection, sensing, computing and storage capabilities, and provide 10 Gbps for the entire house. In addition, the all-optical cloud bus based on 50G PON and 800G OTN needs to implement all-optical one-hop connection between users and DCs and between DCs.
Huawei’s typical technological innovations in this phase include 50G PON and 800G. In addition, the OTN platform needs to be designed for DC scenarios.
- Huawei 50G PON supports symmetric bandwidth, meeting the upstream bandwidth requirements of new digital applications. Its upstream bandwidth is four times of the industry average. In addition, E2E hard slicing provides different SLAs, and the bandwidth can be guaranteed and adjusted from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps.
- Huawei Super 800G supports the PBC non-linear compensation algorithm, extending the transmission distance by 20%. The new materials and COSA packaging technology are used to reduce connection loss by 90% and support 800G and 1.2T programmability.
- Huawei designs the next-generation OTN platform Kepler for data center scenarios. The dual 3D orthogonal architecture increases the capacity of a single subrack to over 100 T which is four times the industry average. It also uses the same front-to-rear ventilation design and AC power supplies as servers. The innovative materials improve the heat dissipation efficiency by three times, decrease the power consumption per gigabit from 0.3 W to 0.1 W and reduce the PUE to 1.2. In addition, the built-in optical processing unit shortens the optical parameter collection and processing duration from seconds to milliseconds, greatly improving O&M efficiency.
“To sum up, HD videos drive 100 Mbps network construction, experience upgrades drive 1 Gbps network construction and intelligent applications drive 10 Gbps network construction. In different service development phases, carriers should build the most appropriate all-optical target network to achieve optimal service experiences and business success,” stated Jin.
The Path to F5.5G: A Spotlight on Six Pivotal Technological Innovations
It can be seen that the evolution from Gbps to 10 Gbps has gradually become a consensus in the industry. Jin cited six technological innovations of F5.5G, which have been widely applied in the past year and helped carriers achieve closed-loop business.
- First, FTTR has been deployed for around 10 million households, improving the home broadband experience, user satisfaction and ARPU. In the future, FTTR will be further applied to enterprises to meet the networking requirements of various scenarios, such as commercial buildings, small and medium-sized shops as well as small campuses.
- Second, Huawei 50G PON has 30+ commercial use and 50+ test cases around the world. The innovative upgrade of Huawei 50G PON will be applied to industrial manufacturing, smart campus and digital home to provide ultra-high bandwidth and ultra-low latency network connections in various scenarios.
- Third, Huawei's premium Wi-Fi has been deployed at more than 60 networks around the world, ensuring reliable, visible and manageable Wi-Fi experiences. It also helps carriers improve precision marketing capabilities, improve user broadband satisfaction and reduce churn rate.
- Fourth, Huawei Alps-WDM solution has been deployed in more than 30 commercial and 50 test networks worldwide, allowing carriers to extend OTN to CO sites, meeting multi-scenario and multi-service requirements and enhancing network SLA monetization.
- Fifth, Huawei has deployed 400G solutions in more than 100 networks around the world. Innovative materials and algorithms enable Huawei 400G to increase the transmission distance by 20% compared with the industry average. Super C+L band expands the spectrum from 9.6T to 12T and increases the spectrum resources and wavelength quantity by 15%. Therefore, the single-fiber capacity and equipment capacity can reach up to 100 T.
- Sixth, Huawei OTN premium private lines provide reliable connections with deterministic latency for more than 10,000 enterprises, and use digital map technologies to recommend optimal paths, thereby improving service SLA monetization capabilities.
“We hope to work with global carriers and partners to implement innovations and business practices, build premium all-optical connections and continuously promote the industry to stride to F5.5G, thereby achieving 10 Gbps Everywhere and realize the "OptiX to Everywhere" vision,” concluded Jin.
Watch the interview here
