ZTE's Practice in Digital Transformation of Virtualization Integration Service

As the digital economy has become an important driving force of the global economic growth, the new technological and industrial revolution characterized by digitization is accelerating. Telecom operators as the enabler for the transformation of the whole industry are continuously expanding their network scale. However, the cross-vendor and cross-component integration is becoming increasingly complex with the uncertain integration quality and the continuously increasing integration costs. Introducing digital methods to improve the efficiency has become imminent.

By extracting the experience from its global virtualization integration projects, ZTE has established an end-to-end and one-stop virtualization integration service system to automate the planning and design, network deployment, and acceptance tests. To facilitate the development of cloud-network integration and the digital economy as well as to tackle the problems faced by the operators, it is urgent for the virtualization integration service to introduce new technologies and models with the existing resource investment scale unchanged. Therefore, digital transformation with innovation at its core is inevitable for the virtualization integration.

ZTE's Digital Integration Methodology

The digital transformation of the virtualization integration service is a systematic revolution triggered by information technologies. With the digital platform, the resource structure and work mode can be changed and the limitations of the business models under the old technology system broken, reducing integration costs and improving integration efficiency.

• Values of digital integration

For enterprises, digital integration can solidify the integration assets, make full use of the full-service data flows, explore new value scenarios of digital integration assets, and push products into a new phase of digital operation. For the industry, digital integration can promote the standardization and automation of integration processes, make integration capabilities procedure-based and tool-oriented, reduce the multi-vendor interoperability difficulties, and drive third-party collaboration and cooperation. For operators, digital integration can reduce risks caused by human errors during project construction, improve construction quality, rapidly complete compatibility and interoperability verification among software and hardware manufacturers, and rapidly launch new services, new products, and new versions.

• Digital integration model

For the virtualization integration service, ZTE has proposed its own digital integration transformation model with a reference to the digital transformations thoughts of the industry. The model (Fig. 1) covering the application architecture, function architecture, data architecture, and technology architecture offers a full view of the digital integration platform, and it links the data from different domains to form measurable digital assets. In addition, the model divides the service applications into eight logical centers to implement full-process orchestration and software-defined integration. A shared ecosystem can be built based on the digital integration platform, and a new business mode created based on the capability assets.

ZTE's Digital Integration Platform

ZTE's independently developed digital integration platform through changing the structure and work mode of the integration service reduces network integration costs and improves integration efficiency, which effectively solves the pain points of NFV network integration.

The ZTE digital integration platform is logically divided into asset layer, execution layer, orchestration layer, and service layer (Fig. 2). The asset layer contains a rich accumulation of asset data, including the integration solution libraries, use case libraries, O&M knowledge libraries and specification libraries, which can be flexibly used by projects. The execution layer has a large number of integration tool suites and configuration scripts to implement the automatic design, deployment, and test of mainstream products, and tools such as big data analysis, O&M monitoring, and intelligent engine will be introduced in the future to continuously improve the level of integration automation and intelligence. The orchestration layer based on the concept of software defined integration achieves interconnection of the integration service processes, fast service content transfer and service orchestration in a visible way. At the service layer, ZTE provides customized solutions for its customers, and also opens the capabilities to assist them in building their independent integration systems.

• Asset digitalization

The integration capability asset library on the asset layer provides databases and information support, digitally models the assets, implements centralized management of asset information through the asset information management platform, supports asset allocation, analysis, and early warning for improved usage efficiency.

• Tool-based capabilities

The NFV integration system management products provide a series of integration tools such as planning, design, deployment, configuration, test, and check, forming a fully automatic tool chain and end-to-end continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) capabilities.

• Orchestration-based services

Digital methods are used to refine the work contents of five scenarios of the NFV network construction process, including integration design, deployment, test, acceptance, and management. The integration tasks are divided into several minimum executable units, cascaded into a pipeline task through the orchestration, and periodically executed according to the predefined scheduling policy with the outputting of task reports, completing highly automated CI or CD deployment tasks.

• Service independence

Each assembly line at the orchestration layer is encapsulated externally to create a visual portal based on the project dimension. A digital service interface is formed by providing personalized application functions in accordance with different service scenarios while extracting the common features of service capabilities to support flexible service orchestration and service innovation. In addition, a new integration mode is established based on "independence and cooperation", helping customers build independent and controllable integration service systems.

Digital Integration Service Solution

The digital integration platform is logically divided into eight service application centers, including the solution, design, delivery, test, ecology, application, assembly line, and asset centers. They are digitally connected, and customizedly orchestrated to meet the integration requirements of different customers.

• Consultation: Based on the customer requirements and digital assets, the platform provides the consultation on the integration technologies and service processes.
• PSI: Through the project cycle actions such as "planning and design, integration verification, integration implementation, and integration handover", the platform enables the products of different manufacturers to deliver a complete, operable, and maintainable production system to customers under the framework of digital integration tools.
• Cloud platform integration: The platform can design, deploy, test, and verify the hardware, Hypervisors, VIMs, SDNs, VNFs, and MANOs based on the mainstream cloud platform, and make the system operate efficiently.
• APP integration: Based on the digital integration framework, quick integration of third-party APPs can be achieved through such means as requirement investigation, integration solution design, virtualized network function descriptor (VNFD) creation, third-party package import, and integration test and verification to accelerate the service launch.
• TaaS: Test-as-a-Service (TaaS) provides an external portal and a hierarchical account, and provides service test experience and charging modes in a telecom cloud environment similar to a public cloud service.
• Pre-integration: The platform provides customers with a customized digital test environment, instructs or assists third-party manufacturers in completing activities such as testing and verification in this environment, outputs test reports, discovers integration risks in advance, and implements pre-integration solutions.
• CI/CD pipeline: The system provides a decouplable CI/CD pipeline and an open-source xTesting framework. It can be interconnected and integrated with the operators' CI/CD environments as required to meet the operators' requirements for establishing their own integration pipeline.
• Independent integration by the operators: The platform empowers the operators in establishing their independent and controllable integration service system.

In addition, the digital integration platform is embedded with the capability center, tool center, and version libraries. The upper layer implements digital integration verification, automatic version protection, remote integration service, and normalized O&M simulation through the integration project management system, pipeline orchestration and scheduling system, remote delivery center, and O&M simulation system, providing good integration service support for ZTE's marketing and engineering departments.

Conclusion

ZTE builds a digital capability collaboration and sharing platform to integrate technologies with resources. Based on the digital platform architecture, ZTE and its partners can achieve low-cost and efficient resource integration, cooperative development, independence of key technologies, capability complementation, and healthy service competition to guarantee the long-term healthy development of the digital system. In the future, ZTE will work with more partners to explore new virtualization integration technologies and models, and continuously build an open-source and shared virtualization network integration ecosystem.