Digital World and Physical Networks Join Forces to Speed Up Intent-Driven Network Innovation

[Switzerland, Geneva, September 14, 2018] At the fifth Ultra-Broadband Forum (UBBF 2018), Kevin Hu, president of Huawei Network Product Line, highlighted that structural issues related to telecom networks have become the biggest obstacle in telecom industry development. Huawei believe the industry can address the issues by building a digital world above the physical network and creating a next-generation user experience-centric network which is driven by business logic and service intent.

Kevin Hu, president of Huawei Network Product Line, spoke at UBBF 2018

With increasing user demand for emerging services such as 4K/8K, ultra HD video, and VR, the data traffic on the entire communication network is increasing 10 times every five years. The emergence of 5G and cloud services will rapidly increase the number of network connections which will lead to traffic distribution uncertainties while expanding the scale of the network 10 fold. For many years, the reactive O&M model driven by user complaints has limited telecom operators’ ability to improve the user experience which has resulted in high customer churn rates.

These telecom network challenges need to be addressed using a systematic architecture mindset and learning from the network architecture innovation model of Internet enterprises. The core competitiveness of Internet enterprises comes from four dimensions: user experience-centric operations, highly automated O&M, fabric architecture, and the always latest technologies. These advantages enable Internet enterprises to effectively deliver a high quality user experience.

For the telecom industry, the development of the digital world is key to improving the user experience. Huawei’s Intent-Driven Network (IDN) solution is designed to build a digital world between the physical network and business logic to help operators change the past discrete network architecture model and achieve user-experience-centric network architecture transformation. The digital world delivers the following benefits:

• Creates an intent-driven closed-loop automation system so that telecom networks can accurately identify users’ business intents and close loops.
• Builds a programmable automation platform to allow different users to implement flexible orchestration based on their own service processes. E2E SRv6 implements flexible and programmable service paths.
• Enables data-driven digital twin. AI technology is introduced to shift from reactive O&M to proactive O&M, perform predictive analysis of networks, identify network faults in advance, and proactively optimize networks based on the business intent.

In addition, physical networks require continuous innovation to pave the way for the digital world. The innovation of physical networks focuses on Moore’s Law and simplified architecture.

• The Moore’s Law drives continuous improvement of bandwidth capabilities of IP, optical, and broadband access networks.
• The fabric-based simplified network architecture separates network services from the bearer network and reduces the cost per bit in structural ways.

Huawei released its IDN solution at MWC 2018. Since then, Huawei has launched 25 NetCity joint innovations with many leading operators around the world. By jointly defining business scenarios and leveraging the DevOps model, operators can quickly introduce the innovative solution and accelerate the commercialization process.

In his speech, Kevin Hu explained that: “Huawei has strong R&D capabilities, well-built solution capabilities, and more than 30 years of experience in core algorithms. Operators have rich operations experience and a deep understanding of end users’ requirements. We hope to deepen our cooperation with more operators around the world who want to drive innovation through the NetCity innovation model, continuously promoting the IDN innovation process and jointly seizing the development opportunities of the intelligent world.”