By Bob Chen, President of Huawei Optical Business Product Line
Looking back on the history of the optical industry, we can clearly see that service changes are the driving force behind its innovation and development and the continuous upgrade of optical technology is accelerating service development.
Since 2009, due to the rapid popularization of video services, fiber has become increasingly popular, and copper has declined in home networks. 100 Mbps FTTH optical access has become a necessity for home broadband, driving OTN transmission networks from 10G to 100G.
Around 2018, as 4K HD video, short video, and smart home services grew rapidly, users were willing to pay for better Wi-Fi and wired networks. This drove the upgrade of home broadband to Gbps and the fast growth of home networking services.
Premium enterprise private lines made OTN transmission networks more than just customer bearer networks; it also made them service networks. To date, the number of global gigabit users has exceeded 200 million, the number of FTTR users has exceeded 20 million, OTN transmission networks have been upgraded to 400G on a large scale, and the extension of all-optical nodes from OTN transmission networks to network edges has gradually become the norm among global operators.
Looking to the next decade, the most important change in the ICT industry will be intelligence. According to predictions from related organizations, the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of global intelligence-related investment will reach 26.9%, and intelligence will be leveraged by enterprises, households, and individuals.
Additionally, leading internet enterprises will compete to implement AI foundational models; government agencies and financial institutions will deploy intelligence in their activities, including in disaster prediction, public security, financial risk control, and marketing; and vertical industries, such as the manufacturing and electric power industries, will also begin to explore AI applications.
At the individual level, intelligent services such as robots, AI assistants, cloud esports, cloud computers, and smart homes will provide novel interactive experiences in the realms of entertainment and life, while traditional living spaces will become smarter.
In the intelligent era, the optical industry will be faced with the challenge of enabling people to utilize intelligence as easily and freely as electricity. We believe that an F5.5G, all-optical 10 Gbps and premium transmission capability target network must be built to do so. The 10 Gbps intelligent access network provides ubiquitous and ultra-broadband 10 Gbps bandwidth, enabling users to experience intelligent services anytime, anywhere. The premium transmission network provides high-quality connections to address computing requirements and satisfies the high-quality connection requirements of distributed data center architectures.
10 Gbps Intelligent Access Network: Ubiquitous 10 Gbps, Differentiated Computing Power Access, and Intelligent Applications with Computing-Network Convergence
In households, services such as AI assistants, 4K cloud esports, cloud NAS, and smart healthcare are promoting the evolution of home networks to “connectivity+computing+intelligence” applications, posing greater demands on networks. For example, if 4K cloud esports users want to play large-scale 3A games on the cloud without using local high-configuration hosts, the access network must provide guaranteed 300 Mbps bandwidth with a latency lower than 5 ms.
Moreover, to ensure that ultra-fast cloud NAS (used to back up photos, videos, and files to the cloud in seconds) can offer the same experience (in terms of storage) on local hard disks, a symmetrical upstream and downstream bandwidth of 10 Gbps is required. To meet the requirements of new services, we believe that the access network needs to evolve to a 10 Gbps intelligent access network, which has the following features:
Firstly, Ubiquitous 10 Gbps Access: 50G PON facilitates 10 Gbps to the home, and Wi-Fi 7 facilitates FTTR, increasing the access rate by 10 times, from 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps. In this way, the access network provides a local-like experience for intelligent services such as AI assistants, ultra-fast cloud NAS, cloud esports, and cloud rendering. To date, more than 30 operators around the world have cooperated with Huawei to complete a series of commercial deployments and verify 10 Gbps optical networks based on 50G PON. These include China Telecom Shanghai's 10 Gbps cloud broadband community, China Unicom Beijing's 10 Gbps live broadcast base, and China Mobile Yunnan's 10 Gbps campus. All these indicate that F5.5G all-optical 10 Gbps networks have entered commercial construction.
Secondly, Deterministic Experience: The access network needs to use intelligent service steering to upgrade best-effort experience to deterministic experience with guaranteed quality. The ONT transmission network identifies computing, video, and internet access services based on service flow characteristics and uses the intelligent E2E hard slicing technology from home Wi-Fi to the CO OLT of the access network to distribute computing services to premium bearer networks. Doing so achieves deterministic 10 Gbps bandwidth, 1 ms latency, and µs-level jitter.
Thirdly, Intelligent Applications with Computing-Network Convergence: Through the sharing and openness of computing power on FTTR and the CO OLT of the access network, more innovative applications can be integrated to accelerate the operators' experience monetization. For example, on the FTTR side, computing power and storage can be converged to provide instant shooting and uploading, smart albums, and "local storage+cloud disk" backup for users. In addition, FTTR is integrated with sensing to detect activities based on Wi-Fi signal fluctuation, protecting home privacy and security. On the CO OLT of the access network, a high-performance computing engine is used to analyze users' application-level data. This helps operators provide services such as experience evaluation and optimization, potential customer identification, and poor-QoE analysis, achieving experience monetization.
Premium Transmission Network: High-Quality One Hop to Computing and Inter-Computing-Center Interconnection
In the internet era, internet access and video services were not available in real-time and were not sensitive to network latency and packet loss. Operators and OTT providers built centralized data centers to serve users. With the advent of the intelligent era, enterprises' and home users' intelligent applications have higher requirements in terms of network connection quality. Data centers are gravitating towards a multi-layer and distributed architecture approach to meet the differentiated bandwidth and latency requirements of services. For example, in the finance and government sectors, customers require data to be stored locally and trained on the cloud. This means the bandwidth from the cloud to the campus network must be higher than Tbps. In distributed computing power collaboration scenarios, if network latency exceeds 1 ms, the computing power efficiency will be greatly reduced. In addition, abnormal network interruption will cause AI training rollback.
Therefore, we believe that operators need a premium transmission network with high bandwidth, low latency, and high reliability. It will facilitate the high-speed interconnection and efficient collaboration of multiple data centers and provide one-click access and on-tap computing power services for various industries. The premium transmission network features the following:
400G 3D-Mesh Backbone Transmission Network: Based on a 3D-mesh architecture, backbone network nodes are connected with the shortest distance using optical cables. Moreover, an ultra-high-speed optical plane is added to hotspot areas to upgrade planar traffic to 3D traffic, preventing network congestion in the hotspot areas and building a data highway between computing centers.
In terms of bandwidth, with the maturity of the industry chain, OTN networks are moving towards 400G. The 400G rate replaces the conventional 100G/200G rate, reducing the cost per-bit by more than 30%. The reduction in the number of occupied wavelengths also reduces O&M costs and brings considerable technical dividends.
In terms of reliability, based on the multi-path protection of optical-electrical synergy ASON, the backup path is automatically restored, the network can withstand multiple fiber cuts, and each protection switching time is shorter than 50 ms. This ensures that network availability reaches 99.9999% and computing power is accessible as long as there is a path.
1 ms, One-Hop, Metro Transmission Network: The architecture needs to be upgraded in two directions—horizontal and vertical.
In the horizontal direction, a metro-core, full-mesh network is built to resolve the high latency caused by data center interconnect (DCI) route detours in a ring network architecture. It enables a one-hop connection between DCs and implements a 1 ms high-speed interconnection between computing centers.
In the vertical direction, OTN is extended to the network edge. OXC is used to upgrade port connections and switch electrical signals to optical ones, enabling the creation of an E2E all-optical switching network. This greatly reduces the latency caused by optical-electrical conversions and congestion. It also achieves premium service access to computing within 1 ms.
During the construction of all-optical, 10 Gbps, premium transmission networks, an intelligent management and control platform is critical. The platform digitalizes transmission network resources, such as bandwidth, latency, reliability, and energy consumption, to implement the integrated and optimal scheduling of computing power and transmission capabilities. For example, the platform can select an optimal path based on the bandwidth and latency requirements of services and the corresponding network’s resources to implement fast-service computing. Additionally, once the platform detects a network reliability risk, it notifies users of the risk promptly and provides optimized suggestions to ensure that the computing power is always on.
Intelligence will be ubiquitous in the next decade, and a solid network foundation is required to support it. Based on the F5.5G, 10 Gbps optical network and premium transmission network, 99.9999% availability ensures that computing power is always on, while 1 ms latency ensures that computing power is instantly accessible, and access to ubiquitous 10 Gbps ensures computing power is accessible everywhere, enabling all intelligence across various industries.
