On June 27, China Unicom and China Telecom received licenses from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) for FDD-TDD LTE integration trials in 16 cities around the country, indicating that 4G deployments are gathering speed in China. Just one day before, the Sichuan branch of China Unicom (Sichuan Unicom for short), in partnership with Huawei, completed the commercial deployment of the world's first software-defined networking based IP RAN (SDN IPRAN) in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. This achievement marks a milestone in the global SDN field and has special significance in the 4G era.
To overcome the challenges of 4G, Sichuan Unicom adopted a "one core and four centers" transformation strategy. One core represents Big Data, and the four centers are High Service, High O&M, Flexible Billing, and Big Traffic. The application of SDN technology in the IP RAN field was critical to Sichuan Unicom's implementation of platform-based High O&M. "We hope this technology will help improve network operations efficiency, speed up service provisioning and time-to-market, and create more value for our customers by further enhancing their 3G and LTE service experience." said Qiao Guiping, General Manager (GM) of Sichuan Unicom.
SDN to tackle new challenges of LTE bearer networks
In the 4G era, network traffic is growing exponentially and new services are rapidly emerging. As a result, the pressure to ensure service quality is enormous, requiring new network O&M mechanisms and faster service development models.
The 4G era has also witnessed a proliferation of small cells, which are energy efficient, easy to deploy, and can effectively improve 4G coverage. It is estimated that the number of small cells worldwide will reach 91 million this year, far more than traditional macro base stations.
Due to the rapid network expansion and exponential growth of access devices, network O&M costs have skyrocketed and service deployment and performance monitoring places greater demand on IP RANs (LTE bearer networks). These problems will become more acute in the coming voice over LTE (VoLTE) phase. According to China Unicom, the proportion of an operator's operating expense (OPEX) to total cost of ownership (TCO, including OPEX and CAPEX, which is short for capital expenditure) rose from 77% to 82% between 2002 and 2012. Moreover, the correlation between Moore's Law and CAPEX is already less than 30%, reducing the impact of Moore's Law on CAPEX reduction.
Sichuan Unicom's High O&M strategy focuses on developing a new O&M mechanism characterized by central monitoring, O&M, and management. The mechanism shifts O&M from a network-centric model to customer- and market-centric model, thereby reducing O&M costs, improving responsiveness to user demands, and enhancing user experience. Liao Jianwen, Sichuan Unicom's deputy GM, noted that Huawei's SDN IPRAN solution aligned closely with their High O&M strategy, and therefore SDN IPRAN was the natural choice.
SDN can substantially improve network performance and is instrumental in building next generation networks. It decouples the control plane from the forwarding plane and enables a flatter and simpler network architecture. Zha Jun, president of Huawei's Fixed Network Product Line, believed that Huawei's SDN IPRAN solution was a good match for Sichuan Unicom's High O&M strategy. In addition, it simplifies network O&M and provides visualization of IP service quality, facilitating the delivery of premium service experience from IP RANs. In other words, SDN technology reshapes IP RANs to tap into the full potential of IP networks.
SDN IPRAN — Efficient O&M, accelerated service innovation
The benefits of the commercial SDN IPRAN have begun to materialize. Overall operations efficiency is up by 60% compared with traditional IP RANs, and real-time packet loss rate detection is accurate to 10-6. To be specific, the SDN IPRAN simplifies O&M, enhances user experience, and boosts service innovation.
Simpler O&M: A multitude of base station routers (ATN devices) at the access layer can be virtualized into CX600 boards for central control and management. As a result, 80% fewer NEs are sensed by the NMS, which minimizes correlative alarms and improves troubleshooting efficiency. In addition, access devices support plug and play, meaning there is no need to modify live network configurations after access devices are installed. Protocol deployment, service delivery, and the addition of nodes to rings are automated during site commissioning, reducing the number of configuration commands per service from 100 to 10.
Enhanced user experience: Service quality can be precisely monitored in real time and fault diagnosis is quick and accurate, enabling operators to assess and predict network performance. Visualized service performance empowers quick response to customer demands and service adjustment. As a result, operators can provide customers with a superior service experience with IP RANs.
Quicker service innovation: After SDN is fully deployed on the IP RAN, network resource utilization and operations efficiency are much higher. The separation of the control plane and forwarding plane greatly reduces the dependency of service development and provisioning on network hardware. This will accelerate service innovation and deployment, enabling operators to rapidly meet customer demands, further enhancing Sichuan Unicom's competitiveness in LTE services. As Liao Jianwen commented, SDN's primary feature is openness. Building an open innovation platform will facilitate Sichuan Unicom's transformation, and developing new services based on market demand will be the key to future success. Zha Jun also expressed that open application development interfaces are critical to future innovation in the industry.
Huawei's leadership in the SDN field
The successful launch of the world's first commercial SDN IPRAN demonstrates Huawei's innovative approaches and commercialization capabilities in the SDN field.
Huawei is an active promoter of SDN standardization and commercialization and holds key positions in several standardization bodies. In joint innovation projects with China Telecom and Telefonica, Huawei simplified network O&M through automated service deployment, ushering in a new age of openness, agility, and smartness. To date, Huawei has carried out more than 35 SDN projects in various telecom domains with more than 20 operators worldwide.
As an advocate of SDN/Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), Huawei is committed to optimizing existing network architectures and developing future-ready SDN architectures, leading SDN commercialization and empowering the maturation of SDN technology in domains such as mobile backhaul, data centers, backbone networks, and smart metro networks. "Huawei is ready to cooperate closely with players in the end-to-end SDN industry chain to develop technologies, standards, applications, products, and solutions, with a clear focus on the healthy development of the industry," said Zha Jun.