L3 Autonomous Networks: 4 Solutions to 4 O&M Challenges Facing Operators

On October 26, 2022, the 14th Huawei User Group Meeting was held in Bangkok, Thailand, with Huawei and global industry leaders, operators, and partners exploring the top carrier issues of 2021. At the event, Wang Shaosen, General Manager of Huawei ADN SDT, delivered a keynote speech on building L3 autonomous network (AN) capabilities to cope with three pain points: O&M efficiency, user satisfaction, and revenue growth, especially for users with high requirements on network O&M.

Huawei’s autonomous driving network (ADN) solution has been widely deployed by many operators and enterprises around the world to achieve L3 capabilities. By introducing intelligence and enhancing automation, this solution has played an important role in increasing O&M efficiency, improving user experience, and developing new services.

Challenge and Solution 1: Intelligent incident management achieves efficient O&M with “One Fault, One Ticket”

Wang Shaosen said that in traditional network O&M, there are a large number of repeated tickets, a high proportion of unnecessary site visits, and faults cannot be predicted. To address these issues, Huawei has built an intelligent incident management solution, which is equivalent to L3 AN and achieves a one fault, one ticket outcome. This solution uses AI to predict faults and applies knowledge graphs to identify the root causes of faults. This not only makes fault prediction and prevention a reality, but also achieves accurate fault location and ticket dispatch.

According to the results observed by operator C, intelligent incident management reduces tickets by 60% due to the improved fault prediction capability.

Challenge and Solution 2: Home broadband (HBB) self-optimization improves user experience and facilitates precision marketing

Currently, network O&M for HBB services focuses more on improving user experience than on expanding the user base. Traditional network O&M lacks experience-oriented O&M management capabilities. In view of this, the Huawei ADN included an HBB experience support system, which uses AI to intelligently extract 100+ key network labels from the multidimensional data collected during network O&M.

These labels help operators:

• gain deeper service insights.
• quickly associate network indicators with key user experience issues.
• automate home network optimization.
• make precise service recommendations.

According to evaluation by operator C, the accuracy of poor-QoE identification reached 95%, customer satisfaction doubled, and the success rate of service recommendations increased by 10%.

Challenge and Solution 3: Intelligent indoor-outdoor optimization improves 5G indoor user experience

In wireless 5G network O&M, interference caused by overlapping coverage has always been a pain point that affects user experience. To address this issue, Huawei ADN integrates an indoor RAN intelligent optimization solution that reduces indoor-to-indoor (I2I) and outdoor-to-indoor (O2I) interference through power adaptation, intelligent grouping, and beam adaptation. According to operator U’s feedback, user-perceived rates have increased by 15% and 3% in I2I and O2I scenarios, respectively, and overlapping coverage has decreased by 18%.

Challenge and Solution 4: Intelligent WTTx suite enables zero-touch development of 5G enterprise broadband users

Traditionally, it costs a lot to increase WTTx user numbers, with numbers manually allocated to new users. To address these challenges, Huawei ADN launched a WTTx suite to implement zero-touch number allocation, with the number allocation mode evolving from pushed by operators to self-service. Self-service means that under the guidance of an app, users can evaluate number allocation and place orders themselves. After devices are delivered to their home — which does not take long — users can install the devices and allocate numbers themselves, as instructed by the app. In just a year, this solution helped operator S attract 114% more subscriptions, improve user-perceived rate by 12%, and reduce installation cost by 90%.

During his speech, Wang invited Mohammed Alzaaidi, Network Operations GM of Saudi Telecom Company (STC), to share STC’s thoughts and practices on AN.

STC in focus

Alzaaidi said that under the guidance of the national digital strategy in Saudi Arabia, STC has launched the DARE 2.0 initiative and adopted TM Forum‘s AN framework. After three years of network evolution, STC reached L2 AN in 2022 and plans to reach L3 next year.

Alzaaidi shared details about STC’s Intelligent Network Operations 360 Platform, mentioning that the platform uses technologies such as anomaly detection, process mining, and automated KPI degradation analysis.

These have produced strong results:

• improving resolution time by 30%
• reducing root-cause isolation time by 20%
• improving workflows and inter-vendor WLAs across for fault restoration by 70%.

STC plans to focus on evolving to L3 and building-in predictive analysis and automatic decision-making capabilities.

Wang concluded his speech by reiterating that Huawei is always willing to work with operators to build an industry-leading ADN solution; bring intelligent O&M to every network; and help customers reduce costs, improve efficiency, and achieve business success.

Watch the video of the event here.

Learn more about Huawei’s autonomous driving network (ADN) solution.

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