The commercial use of this intent-driven 5G transport network, built based on the Slicing Packet Network (SPN) technology proposed by China Mobile, paves the way for China Mobile Zhejiang's overall 5G commercial deployment and signifies China Mobile Zhejiang's global leadership in 5G deployment.
5G provides more diversified services and meets the requirements of more vertical industries than 4G. Examples of emerging services that utilize 5G include 4K/8K videos, the West Lake virtual reality (VR) live streaming, and the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University’s 5G telemedicine services. All of these services increase bandwidth requirements by tenfold, placing higher demand on transport networks than 4G. In terms of network deployment and O&M, traditional device-centric network architecture and manual O&M are no longer feasible for 5G network construction. Intelligence and automation are instead needed now to improve network deployment and O&M efficiency.
China Mobile Zhejiang has been at the forefront of Chinese service innovation and is committed to providing a high-quality service experiences to customers. China Mobile Zhejiang worked with Huawei to start researching 5G transport networks as early as 2016 and constructed China's largest pilot 5G transport network using SPN in 2018. So far, China Mobile Zhejiang has established nearly 1,000 5G base stations and successfully put the Network Cloud Engine (NCE) into commercial use, creating China's first commercial site for the intent-driven 5G transport network.
Yang Zhiqiang, deputy director of China Mobile Research Institute, and Kevin Hu, president of Huawei Data Communication Product Line, both delivered speeches at the conference. Yang reviewed the key breakthroughs and progresses that China Mobile has made together with industry partners like Huawei on SPN technological innovation, international standardization, and industry driving. He also hoped that the industry chain continues to make efforts to advance SPN deployment in existing networks, promotion of SPN in the industry, and technological evolution of SPN, to embrace the start of large-scale commercial use of SPN and create a bright future of SPN and 5G. Hu said that the launch of the 5G transport network has kicked off the large-scale commercial use of 5G in China. The experiences China Mobile Zhejiang gained constructing these networks will provide valuable reference for the large-scale commercial use of 5G in China and around the world.
"Facing challenges in 5G transport networks, China Mobile Zhejiang chose to partner with Huawei and the two companies jointly established the 5G transport innovation project team," said Zhou Ping, deputy general manager of the planning and technology department of China Mobile Zhejiang, "China Mobile Zhejiang has continuously invested in 5G transport network research and innovation, the results of which have been very fruitful."
According to Zhou, existing equipment is being reused at the core and aggregation layers, and board capacity can be expanded on demand. At the access layer, 10GE/50GE access rings have been constructed to meet the massive data access requirements of 5G base stations. The total cost of ownership (TCO) for network construction has thus been reduced.
SPN is used to implement network slicing and service level agreement (SLA)-based intelligent route selection is used to build a high-quality 5G transport network, providing SLA guarantee for vertical industries and supporting industry applications with high requirements, such as the internet of vehicles (IoV) and smart grid. The use of NCE allows for automatic site addition and intelligent clock synchronization, improving both the base station service provisioning efficiency and clock synchronization deployment efficiency by over 85%. In-situ flow information telemetry (iFIT) helps achieve fast fault demarcation and location, greatly improving network O&M efficiency. The combined use of NCE and big data analytics facilitates intelligent O&M and the automation of the 5G transport network lifecycle.
"Huawei is honoured to have supported China Mobile Zhejiang in building this world-leading intent-driven 5G transport network. This has also been a very successful application of our 5G transport solution," said Hank Chen, president of service router domain of Huawei Data Communication Product Line. "Huawei will deepen our collaboration with China Mobile Zhejiang to help the company continue to lead in 5G transport and achieve business success."
MWC 19 Shanghai ran from June 26 to June 28 in Shanghai, China.
