Innovative Huawei SDN+400G Constructing Intelligent IP Backbone NetworksWhen opening TCP/IP Illustrated, your must-have book in communications, you will definitely be amazed by the classical routing protocols. These protocols function as the Code of Internet responsible for connecting our devices. The near 6-billion Tbit data flows of the modern society are transmitted over the Internet along the routes pre-determined or calculated by routing protocols, regardless of the service type, device, or network scheme. More and more cloud services, such as films, books, music, chatting, and big data are now running over the Internet, causing IP backbone networks to converge large amounts of data of great importance to individuals, businesses, and governments. As innovative services grow rapidly, such as 4K videos, cloud computing, and virtual business, IP backbone networks are being faced with unprecedented requirements on bandwidth expansion. However, customer service requirements tend to vary by social group, region, city, etc. Simply relying on classical routing protocols and complex network configurations cannot fully meet their requirements.
Regional economic prosperity not only brings about the expanding Internet services, but also poses great burden on the backbone networks, since the high population mobility between big cities makes the network-wide traffic more changeable. The traffic demand in more developed provinces in Southeast China exceeds that of the northwest region. Take Shenzhen as an example. The annual volume of e-commerce transactions in Shenzhen is approximately equal to the annual volume of transactions of five provinces in Northwest China put together. In big cities, the data traffic flows through business zones or CBDs in the morning as people begin to work, and residential areas in the evening as people return to their homes. On the weekends, the data traffic flows to various stadiums and exhibition halls where auto shows, concerts, or other activities are held. Traditional backbone networks cannot quickly respond to the changing and unbalanced traffic within a city or between cities. The conflicts between the insufficient bandwidth in some areas and the low bandwidth usage across the entire network are becoming more and more prominent. These shortcomings will not be resolved by simply increasing investments or depending on manual adjustment by engineers. Manual adjustments require complicated operations and are slow in response to rapid changes in the network, and therefore are unable to meet operators' need for growing services.
On April 18, 2014, Beijing Telecom became the first operator to commercially deploy SDN+400G using Huawei 400G core routers and SDN solution. The intelligent IP backbone network constructed by Beijing Telecom can improve bandwidth usage by optimizing traffic rapidly according to operators' policies and the live-network status. The BGP network traffic optimization solution innovatively allows the Huawei SDN controller to calculate route convergence based on bandwidth requirements of links and services. The SDN controller is used to obtain the source and destination addresses, routes, services, and bandwidth usage network-wide and then process and deliver them to core routers and other devices. This allows the backbone network to be able to rapidly adjust traffic based on service type, customer, and network status and accordingly provide customers with a refined service experience. Huawei SDN+400G intelligent backbone network has separate control and forwarding planes. The control plane employs the Huawei SDN controller and NMS, and functions as an intelligent traffic management system suitable for a modern metropolis. This system can change traffic lights intelligently or as required based on existing traffic rules, easing the pressures of traffic on different roads during the daily rush hour. As a result, the commuting efficiency is improved and congestion in some areas is avoided.
The latest Huawei NE5000E 400G platform, a flagship core router, was deployed on the forwarding plane and most importantly, the innovative Huawei Solar 3.0 network processor (NP) was adopted. Solar 3.0 uses programmable interfaces to communicate with the SDN controller. The Solar 3.0 chip distributes a large number of routes to the router's routing line cards and interfaces so that these routes can be used for transmission. In addition, to cooperate with SDN for better network optimization, the NE5000E uses flexible 400G routing line cards that are capable of housing 10GE/40GE/100GE high-density interfaces as needed. The entire system capacity can reach 6.4 Tbit/s. Huawei NE5000E 400G solution allows a single slot to expand smoothly from 400G to 1T and a maximum of 2T in the future. The 400G cluster can also be expanded to support more slots, meeting capacity expansion needs of backbone networks for the next 5 to 10 years, protecting customer investment. According to test data released by EANTC, an authoritative third-party organization, a fully-configured 400G NE5000E consumes only 8106 W power at line speed, half of that consumed by competing products in the industry. The low power consumption fits into the common strategy of telecom operators which is to deploy energy saving IP backbone networks.
With the help of Huawei SDN's innovative control plane and the successful application of the 400G routing platform on the forwarding plane, IP backbone networks have been liberated from the traditional routing protocols. The new backbone networks are intelligent, high-efficient, and energy-saving, with optimized network traffic and shared network resources, creating new service experience for customers.