Recently, NGON 2023 & Huawei Optical Innovation Forum 2023 were held in Cannes, France. The event brought together Huawei, global carriers, and analysts to discuss the opportunities and challenges faced by the industry and share technological innovations and solution applications updates.

June 2, 2023

4 Min Read
Huawei logo at MWC 2017
(Source: Karlis Dambrans on Flickr, CC 2.0)

Recently, NGON 2023 & Huawei Optical Innovation Forum 2023 were held in Cannes, France. The event brought together Huawei, global carriers, and analysts to discuss the opportunities and challenges faced by the industry and share technological innovations and solution applications updates. During the conference, Dr. Christopher Janz, Technical Vice President of Huawei Optical Systems Competency Center, delivered a keynote speech and introduced the new architecture and vision of Huawei iMaster NCE T-AUTO to the industry, aiming to lead the direction of optical network automation.

Figure 1: Dr. Christopher Janz, Technical Vice President of Huawei Optical Systems Competency Center Dr. Christopher Janz, Technical Vice President of Huawei Optical Systems Competency Center

Christopher Janz discussed the ongoing evolution of WDM networks, emphasizing the importance of meeting distinct and deterministic SLA requirements, especially when new services such as data center interconnection and enterprise cloudification are growing rapidly. In this new phase of service development, users are concerned about both WDM bandwidth and latency, rather than just bandwidth alone. Data center interconnection serves as a prime example of this trend, with the latency between AZs within a region being less than 1 ms and the latency between regions being less than 10 ms. With the digital cloudification and interconnection of medium- and large-sized enterprises, WDM networks are transforming from basic connection networks to service networks. Bandwidth and availability have become the core requirements of enterprise users.

Optical network development is currently facing three major challenges.

  1. The physical route topologies of fiber networks are irregular, and virtual service routes change frequently, making it difficult to quantify and guarantee service latency in real time.

  2. Services working and protection routes are in the same fiber or cable, and the route topologies are complex, making it challenging to evaluate and guarantee services availability.

  3. The expansion of WDM from the metro core to COs, sites and buildings, generating tremendous challenges of handling 100x increase in the number of nodes and services with carriers’ limited planning and O&M manpower.

To overcome these challenges, the Huawei iMaster NCE optical developed the innovative T-AUTO vision. Transport Digital Map serves as the foundation, upon that, capabilities such as Agile Service Routing, Ultimate SLA Guaranteed, and Time-Saving Ticket Journey enhance optical network automation level. Meanwhile, together with "Open to NaaS", they enable WDM infrastructure networks to better meet the diversified service requirements in the new era, helping carriers improve efficiency and increase revenue.

Figure 2: Huawei iMaster NCE T-AUTO Huawei iMaster NCE T-AUTO

  • Transport Digital Map is the foundation of optical network automation. Similar to the mobile map App, it abstracts, models, and digitizes the optical network physical world to construct an optical network digital world that contains information such as optical fibers, topologies, channels, bandwidths, latency and availability, enabling automation of high-quality services and accelerating monetization of physical networks.

  • Agile Service Routing leverages the power of the Transport Digital Map to meet differentiated SLA requirements of different customers in different scenarios, enabling carriers to match diverse service scenarios on a single network. This not only enhances service competitiveness but also shortens the network ROI period.

  • Ultimate SLA Guaranteed provides online service planning capabilities, resolving the common pain point of frequent rework caused by inconsistency between offline planning data and live-network data. It also offers one-click cross-layer E2E service provisioning capability that reduces service provisioning time from weeks to hours. In terms of service SLA assurance, the collaboration of iMaster NCE and ASON-layer on protocol-level prevents violation risks caused by fiber cuts and node faults, continuously ensuring SLA.

  • With Time-saving Ticket Journey, which is based on association analysis of massive alarms, identification mode of fault incidents, and GIS-based intelligent fault diagnosis, carriers can implement minute-level fault locating and achieve “One fault, One ticket”.

  • The Open to Network as a Service (NaaS) capability is powered by iMaster NCE, which allows carriers integrate with OSSs/BSSs via IETF ACTN NBIs. It helps carriers provide user-oriented e-commerce service experience, greatly improving service competitiveness.

Concluding his keynote speech, Christopher noted that in order to achieve high-quality development, it is important to support adaptability of network supply structures to application demands. Huawei's new iMaster NCE T-AUTO vision is designed to anchor the changes of key requirements in optical network evolution from basic networks to high-quality service networks, and is set to become the driving force behind optical NaaS and automation innovation. This revolutionary vision will facilitate transformation in quality and efficiency and guide the planning of a new blueprint for the evolution of all-optical transport networks.

This content is sponsored by Huawei

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