The rapid developments in the fields of 4K/VR, enterprise cloud interconnect, and 5G bring about increasing service diversity. To achieve success, metro networks must remain at the forefront of business innovation and constantly explore ways to enhance user experience.
"Only a metro area network capable of rapid integration, efficient operations, and network capability openness can meet the commercial needs of the new services,” said Wei Feng, CMO of Huawei's Network Product Line. “To exhibit these features, a metro network must use a cloud-based architecture.”
The CloudMetro solution is a new business enablement system designed to be equipped for future demands. This solution comprises two parts: upper-layer network cloud engine (NCE) and an underlying E2E slicing-capable bearer network. It separates the functional modules, cloud operating system, and underlying physical devices into different layers.
The CloudMetro solution moves management and service functions to the NCE to provide an on-demand LEGO-style service provisioning capability. By introducing service function chains to allow for on-demand service function selection and deployment, this architecture lowers trial costs, and significantly shortens service TTM from months to days, satisfying carriers' differentiated service innovation requirements.
The standard northbound interfaces are opened to third parties, allowing more applications to be supported. Huawei provides a lab for remote online integration verification, marking a departure from independent development to joint development with partners. Huawei aims to cooperate with industry partners to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes.
The forwarding-control separation design allows this architecture to achieve cloud-based centralized resource control and on-demand dynamic resource scheduling, increasing resource utilization. Unified service management, centralized resource control, and flexible resource scheduling across layers, domains, and vendors allow for online self-service service subscription, one-touch service provisioning, cloud-based service upgrades, and visualized O&M, improving the O&M efficiency tenfold.
The network slicing router released by Huawei can be used to construct an E2E slicing-capable network. By flexibly slicing network resources along management and control, protocol processing, and forwarding lines, this type of router can provide differentiated SLA for home broadband, 4G/5G, enterprise leased line, and other services. At MWC 2017, Huawei and DT jointly demonstrated 5G network slicing.
"Future metro networks require not only improved service bearer efficiency, but also openness and rapid integration capabilities to meet the diversified demands of future services and applications. We must unleash the full potential of metro networks for rapid network monetization," said Wei Feng.