At MWC Shanghai 2021, Kevin Hu, President of Huawei Data Communication Product Line, announced the “five ones” new capabilities of the Intelligent cloud network solution. This solution helps carriers build cloud-oriented service networks and core capabilities for DICT transformation.

• One hop to cloud
• One-network wide connection
• One-click fast scheduling
• One fiber for multiple purposes
• One-stop integrated security

According to Kevin Hu, the cloud network is the key enabler in the digital economy, bringing new impetus for the fourth industrial revolution. The cloud network provides continuous computing power for numerous industries, stimulating new growth in the digital economy.

The digital transformation of many industries positions DICT as a driver for carrier growth in the digital economy era. The total available market (TAM) growth rate of DICT, taking Chinese carriers as an example, has reached 40%.

Carriers adopt the DICT strategy to meet the digital transformation demands of their industry customers and the new opportunities are accompanied by new changes and challenges.

Change 1: Cloud access demands are increasing rapidly. 93% of enterprises will use public clouds, and 74% of enterprises will use hybrid clouds. Enterprises have demands for multi-cloud connection through single-point access.

Change 2: Enterprise private lines are shifting to cloud private networks. After enterprise service systems are cloudified, the enterprise needs to transform from private lines to globally reachable cloud private networks.

Change 3: Best-effort forwarding is shifting to experience assurance. The cloudification of enterprise production systems means that networks need to change from best-effort forwarding to deterministic experience assurance.

Change 4: Single-point security is shifting to all-round protection. To meet service cloudification requirements, security needs to change from single-point protection provided by firewalls to E2E (from devices, networks, and clouds to applications) security collaboration and all-round protection capabilities.

These changes bring new challenges to networks such as Integrated cloud-network scheduling needs to be provided to enterprises to implement one-stop subscription to cloud-network products and provide e-commerce-like service experience. Enterprises also require a consistent cloud and network experience. In addition, production system cloudification requires the networks to provide E2E SLA assurance. Finally, as more and more data enters clouds, the original physical security boundaries are broken — the digital world requires collaboration among enterprises, networks, and clouds for security protection.

Huawei’s intelligent cloud network solution, through its five-ones new capabilities (one hop to cloud, one-network wide connection, one-click fast scheduling, one fiber for multiple purposes, and one-stop integrated security), maximizes the value of carriers’ network resources and fully leverages the complementary advantages of clouds and networks. As such, it is the key for carriers to provide DICT services integrating clouds and networks.

One hop to the cloud: Cloud access paths enable cloud access within minutes

The cloud backbone provides flexible connections between multiple clouds and networks while SRv6-based cloud access paths streamline cross-domain connections. With technology breaking process barriers, experience on clouds and networks becomes consistent, and service access to clouds through one network can be implemented within minutes.

One-network-wide connection: Network-as-a-service delivers cloud-like network usage.

The service-oriented network architecture provides tenant-level interfaces to shield network implementation details. This reduces the system integration time by 90%, enabling enterprises to use networks as conveniently as using clouds. Furthermore, with iMaster NCE’s intelligent distributed path computation, the scale of network connections reaches 100 times greater than the industry average, meeting the demands for ultra-large-scale networking and global interconnection of numerous tenants.

One-click fast scheduling: The intelligent cloud graph algorithm improves IDC resource utilization by 30%.

The intelligent cloud graph algorithm, combining network and cloud factors, provides optimal cloud access paths for enterprises and implements integrated scheduling of cloud and network resources. This improves the cloud and network resource utilization by 30%.

One fiber for multiple purposes: Hierarchical slicing provides a deterministic service experience for numerous industries.

On the enterprise side, the intelligent cloud terminal — a box-shaped device — provides access to multiple services requiring different SLAs, such as CCTV, office Internet access, and remote conferencing. On the network side, one fiber to different slice-based service private networks provides fine-granularity experience assurance.

One-stop integrated security: The QIANKUN security cloud service builds all-round security protection.

Working with TianGuan enterprise-side security gateways, the QIANKUN security cloud service builds all-round defense capabilities that feature cloud-network-security integration. This helps achieve a 96% detection rate for new threats, detection of hidden attacks within minutes, near-source blocking of threats related to cloud-network security integration, cloud-based deployment of atomic security capabilities, and cloud-based O&M and security services in subscription mode.

To date, Huawei has carried out joint cloud network innovation and commercial use with more than 30 carriers, serving digitalization scenarios, covering government, healthcare, education, finance, mining, port, iron and steel, and electric power industries. Looking ahead, Huawei will continue to innovate based on IPv6+ technologies and refine the intelligent cloud network solution to help carriers explore the business value of connections, build new business models, and accelerate the digital transformation of industries.

At Mobile World Congress Shanghai (MWC) 2021, Huawei showcase products and technologies in the field of 5G, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), big data, and more.

During the event, Huawei has announced that its innovative RuralStar Pro solution has been commercially rolled out in Guizhou, China. This solution is designed in accordance with the integrated access and backhaul (IAB) model and promises to significantly lower the deployment costs associated with providing voice and mobile broadband services for remote villages.

At the event, Huawei Wireless Network Site Product Line President, David Guo introduced RuralStar Pro in detail. As per his observation, he said that 600 million people in the world still have no access to mobile connectivity, and the RuralStar Pro solution could provide connections for these uncovered areas at the optimal cost and fastest speed.

This solution integrates a baseband unit (BBU), a remote radio unit (RRU), and a relay device into a single module, enabling one module one site. The power consumption of each site is less than 120 W. The head of a village can deploy it independently and have an engineer configure it remotely and this significantly reduces the end-to-end cost of deployment, as well as a return on investment, which can be expected within three years.

Last month, it was reported that Huawei and China Unicom jointly deployed the world’s first commercial RuralStar Pro site in Maopo village to provide voice and data services for villagers. This helps in digitalization in rural areas and brings villagers out of poverty.

The valley where Maopo Village is located is often foggy, meaning that microwave solutions cannot be used there, and the cost of laying optical fiber on winding mountain roads is too high. With RuralStar Pro, the installation of a base station and the provisioning of LTE and VoLTE service can be completed in two hours. The coverage rate in the village is now 85% and the downlink speeds reach 30 Mbps.

Abraham Kofi Asante, CEO of the Ghana Investment Fund for Electronic Communications (GIFEC), also appeared at MWC Shanghai to speak about the organization’s rural network deployment plan. GIFEC plans to work with Huawei to deploy more than 2,000 RuralStar sites.

It’s estimated that 3.4 million people in 172 rural areas will benefit from this plan, and Ghana’s mobile coverage rate will increase from 83% to 95%. This, says Asante, will give an enormous boost to the local economy. In this project, GIFEC will be responsible for the construction and local operators will run the service. Profits will be split between them. This project is running smoothly now, and the over 400 deployed RuralStar sites are already generating revenue, and a return on investment is expected in less than three years.

Fatogoma Aristide Sanon, Deputy CEO of Orange Guinea, also shared his country’s digitalization strategy. He noted that, during the pandemic, digitalization has been crucial in all aspects of life, including the economy, education, and healthcare. Orange is committed to digital inclusion for everyone in Guinea.

At last, Guo concluded his speech by emphasizing that, in the three years since its initial launch, Huawei’s RuralStar solution has been continuously evolving, and that Huawei is committed to sustained innovation in order to bring digital to every person, home, and organization.

Huawei and China Telecom Shenzhen jointly launched the world’s first pilot site that binds 5G Super Uplink and downlink carrier aggregation (CA). This pilot leverages Super Uplink to maximize uplink coverage and experience, as well as fully utilizes downlink dual-carrier CA to deliver the optimal user experience.

This a matter of new breakthrough following China Telecom and Huawei’s joint commercial adoption of Super Uplink. The success of this pilot shows that the advantages of China Telecom and China Unicom sharing 5G networks, once seen only in technical solutions, are already available on commercial networks.

The coordination of TDD and FDD reflects a new trend in 5G network construction. By pooling both Super Uplink and downlink CA, 5G networks leverage the complementary advantages between 5G high bands and low bands as well as the aggregation in both the time and frequency domains.

This will further provide 5G networks with higher bandwidth, wider coverage, and lower latency, which are urgently required to expand 5G’s applications across 5G vertical industries. This will also enable 5G cells to support a bandwidth of up to 200 MHz, ensuring a premium downlink experience in network sharing use cases.

According to Huawei, this pilot site uses 200 MHz 3.5 GHz TDD spectrum and 20 MHz 2.1 GHz FDD spectrum in the uplink. Single-user concurrent tests were completed in standalone (SA) networking mode.

The results of the test showed that the average uplink rate reached 470 Mbps and the average downlink rate of 2.43 Gbps, which are approximately 1.3 times and double that with a single 100 MHz bandwidth, respectively.

5G Super Uplink has notable advantages over uplink CA. Super Uplink enables integrated uplink scheduling between two uplink carriers in one cell. This scheduling mechanism is more efficient than uplink CA implemented between two cells.

In addition, uplink and downlink bands are decoupled, enabling downlink carriers to be flexibly added to adapt to data traffic requirements. For example, CA can be disabled or implemented within one band or between two bands.

As uplink CA depends on downlink CA and its bands must be a subset of downlink CA bands, uplink CA cannot be used in the cases of asymmetric uplink-only bands, further highlighting the greater flexibility of Super Uplink.