8 November 2021, Shenzhen, China - ZTE Corporation (0763.HK / 000063.SZ), a major international provider of telecommunications, enterprise and consumer technology solutions for the mobile Internet, today announced that Mr. Hu Junjie, Vice President of Wired Product, has delivered a speech entitled “5G Ready transport network enables network digital transformation” at the ZTE Global Analyst Conference 2021 held in Shenzhen, China. Mr. Hu shared with the analysts about the capabilities that the transport network must have in the 5G era, and elaborated on how ZTE's transport network architecture meets the 5G service demands and promotes the digital transformation of networks.
According to Mr. Hu, digital transformation has become an inevitable trend in network development, and it includes two aspects. The first is industrial digitalization, that is, digital transformation of traditional industries. It improves production output and efficiency, thereby bringing about new revenue growth. The other is digit industrialization. Data is regarded as new productivity, and the existing data is sorted out, analyzed, and commercialized.
To cope with the digital transformation, ZTE proposes the 5G ready transport network, which employs a new transport network architecture. In traditional architecture, cloud and network resources are independent of each other while interfaces are not open to each other, and O&M teams are independent and cross-team O&M is complicated. The 5G ready transport network with hierarchical disaggregation enables independent planning of the network layer, service layer, and management & control layer. Each layer provides service interfaces for the upper layer, and the changes on one layer do not affect another.
The network, similar to computing and storage resources, will become standard components and open to each other. Like an APP, it can be flexibly used by differentiated services in various industries. Firstly, the network layer supports Connection as a Service (CaaS). It provides basic network capabilities such as ultra-high bandwidth and deterministic low latency, and provides standard components for the service layer. Secondly, the service layer implements Network as a Service (NaaS). It provides programmable service capabilities to build up an agile and flexible service network meeting upper-layer service requirements. Thirdly, the management & control layer implements Experience as a Service (EaaS). It turns the subscribers’ experience demands into network demands, interconnects with the service layer, and finally implements a perceptible and intelligently autonomous evolving network.
“At the network layer, ZTE provides all-scenario high-bandwidth solutions covering backbone, regional and metro/DCI. ZTE has implemented the world’s first 120-wave 400G ON innovation pilot project, shown excellent performance in 800G test in live network, and is pushing its latest 1.2T technology to commercial use,” said Mr. Hu. “At the same time, ZTE employs flexible optical connection solutions to optimize network architecture. It uses 32-degree to over 40-degree RODAM and OXC to implement full-mesh connection so as to rebuild the topology and create a flat network, thereby implementing low latency, high reliability and end-to-end all-optical cloud connections, on which ZTE provides the deterministic slicing solution to implement on-demand slicing, on-demand isolation and on-demand deployment of differentiated services, so that the networks can be flexible and efficient while meeting service SLA.”
At the service layer, ZTE implements the cloud and network synergy. It supports cloud access in multiple ways at multiple nodes and multi-cloud interconnection. It integrates computing power resources and transport networks to flexibly schedule computing power and improve network resource utilization. Based on SRv6 and Inband OAM, the networks become programmable and perceptible. The cloud native network OS shortens the service provisioning time from months to days, significantly shortens TTM and supports elastic network scale-in/scale-out.
At the management & control layer, in order to implement quick end-to-end service provisioning, ZTE adopts end-to-end orchestration system to implement automatic service deployment and O&M from wireless network, transport network to core network. In order to assist the customers in evolving to the more intelligent stage, ZTE adopts the latest AI technology, and carries out innovations from planning, provisioning, maintenance, to optimization. At present, ZTE’s intelligent AI management and control platform can provide open and disaggregated standard interfaces, and cooperate with operators and third-party manufacturers to implement customized platform functions based on Python, microservice PaaS and Open API.
To date, as a mature and commercialized solution, ZTE’s 5G-ready network has been widely deployed all over the world. For example, ZTE has built new 5G MANs based on SRv6 and EVPN in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Zhejiang and Fujian in China. Besides, ZTE has built an intelligent, ultra-broadband and evolvable 5G IPRAN network to achieve unified transport of 2G/3G/4G/5G mobile services, FTTx, WLAN access and enterprise private line services in Thailand.