L3 All-Optical Networks: Boost Customer Satisfaction with Next-Level Automation

Network scale continues to expand alongside user requirements for improved network efficiency and stability. And for carriers, great business opportunities are accompanied by the challenge to deliver high-quality services. That is set to become easier with the evolution of network automation in all domains, which will upgrade the Huawei all-optical network solution to L3.

The L3 all-optical ADN solution uses a three-layer intelligent architecture comprising the NE, network, and service layers. The intelligent network management and control system iMaster NCE serves as the core for automating network O&M and building an efficient and reliable all-optical infrastructure network.

All-Optical Infrastructure: Challenges and solutions

The all-optical infrastructure network is the bearer base of all-optical networks, including all-optical access and transport networks. The L3 all-optical ADN solution focuses on dumb fiber resources and key issues in optical network service planning, maintenance, and optimization. It uses big data and intelligent technologies to achieve efficient O&M, improving network efficiency and reliability.

Challenge 1

As optical fibers are passive components, it is difficult to implement visualized management.

Solution
The L3 all-optical ADN uses the ODN pre-connection solution, optical iris technology, intelligent image identification technology, and O&M capabilities to achieve accurate resource input, remote acceptance, and precise fault location. It automatically identifies risks in co-cable optical fibers and prevents potential risks based on the real-time awareness of optical transport NEs and Huawei-developed algorithms.

Challenge 2

The expanded scale of optical networks and mesh networking makes service complex, creating two major challenges: One, the management of planning data sources are distributed, making synchronization difficult and error-prone. Two, manual site-by-site resource inspections and offline service planning are inefficient, resulting in frequent rework and prolonged service planning.

Solution
iMaster NCE provides online service expansion planning and unified data source planning – planning, deployment, and live-network data single-sourcing – to resolve data conflicts and plan rework from the source. Multi-dimensional resource visualization helps to quickly identify resource bottlenecks. After the source and sink sites are selected, idle wavelengths and electrical-layer resources, i.e., sites and devices, can be checked with just one click. Online multi-policy intelligent service route planning; the one-click configuration of electrical-layer subracks, boards, and optical modules; and the automatic application of service configurations enable fast and flexible planning with minimum resource consumption.

In the field:

For China Unicom Beijing, E2E resource automation has cut service configuration and application from 7 days to 1 day.

Challenge 3

For optical fiber maintenance, carriers typically respond after network faults occur, which can lead to long service interruptions.

Solution
iMaster NCE provides an optical network health assurance solution that offers big data analysis based on device sensing capabilities and the Huawei-developed optical network sub-health prediction algorithm. The solution visualizes, predicts, and locates the health status of fibers and OChs (optical channel layers), transforming O&M from passive to proactive and eliminating faults before they occur.

In the field:

China Mobile Guangdong uses the optical network health assurance solution to analyze the health status of each fiber and OCh through machine learning and intelligent prediction algorithms to predict faults and fault points in advance based on optical performance. iMaster NCE identifies co-cable SRLGs in co-route fibers and performs optical-layer digital modeling to identify co-cable fibers in five different scenarios, including primary and secondary fibers and fibers on the same ring. This covers more than 95% co-cable scenarios, improving network reliability and availability, and achieving premium connections. The intelligent incident management function of iMaster NCE uses three-layer intelligent processing – alarm compression, alarm aggregation, and fault location – to accurately locate the root cause of a fault within three minutes, even when processing many alarms.

Premium Broadband with a Manageable Experience

WFH, online education, and VR HD video services all require high-quality home broadband. Conventionally, home broadband experience cannot be measured and guaranteed by network monitoring alarms and KPIs.

However, the L3 all-optical ADN delivers a high-quality home broadband service experience.

Smart AEC boards are deployed in OLTs to detect service KPIs, such as latency and packet loss rate (PLR), in real time and perform edge computing on data. iMaster NCE collects more than 300 network KPIs and performs user experience modeling and analysis to automatically:

• Identify subscribers experiencing poor QoE.
• Demarcate and locate QoE problems on the home network, PON optical line, OLT, or bearer network.
• Suggest root causes and give recommendations to help O&M personnel rectify QoE issues.

QoE analysis data and device network capabilities can help carriers tap into new revenue streams, such as upgrading home networks and broadband, or providing scenario-based broadband or high-quality home broadband services.

In the field:

China Mobile Huzhou could only identify home broadband issues, such as network stalling and slow response, when users complained. Using Huawei’s solution, the carrier can quickly identify subscribers with a poor QoE and locate and resolve issues, reducing the poor-QoE rate by 43%. iMaster NCE fully analyzes terminal application types, networking, experience status, and poor-QoE bottlenecks in home broadband services. China Mobile Huzhou has increased its marketing conversions fivefold thanks to insights into user experience trends and potential requirements.

iMaster NCE is also playing a key role in building all-optical gigabit FTTR. It enables fast deployment and acceptance, provides 24/7 fault warnings, and ensures a high-quality service experience.

Days-Level Provisioning and Premium Optical Private Lines

Optical private lines are a high-value service for carriers. However, cloud migration, online services, and intelligence have brought new requirements and challenges, including providing optical private line services with differentiated SLAs such as bandwidth, latency, and availability; fast provisioning; and customer self-service.

Automatic awareness and the intelligent analysis of optical networks allows iMaster NCE to provide digital measurements, real-time monitoring, and automatic threshold warnings for SLA indicators such as latency, availability, and bandwidth. iMaster NCE also provides optimization suggestions for service availability risks, preventing potential faults from occurring. It also enables full-scenario E2E service provisioning, CPE plug and play (PnP), and bandwidth on demand (BoD), and exposes network service capabilities to OSSs.

With L3 all-optical ADN technology fully integrated into private line operations, carriers can provide differentiated high-quality services. Currently, the solution has been applied in more than 40 projects, helping carriers implement private-line service automation and customer self-service; greatly shortening service planning to provisioning; and enabling the premium experience of zero-touch services, zero-wait provisioning, and zero faults.

Click for more info about the Huawei All-Optical ADN solution and iMaster NCE.

Disclaimer: Any views and/or opinions expressed in this post by individual authors or contributors are their personal views and/or opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views and/or opinions of Huawei Technologies.