13 December 2021, Shenzhen, China - ZTE Corporation (0763. HK / 000063.SZ), a major international provider of telecommunications, enterprise, and consumer technology solutions for the mobile internet, today announced that Hu Junjie, General Manager of Wired Product Marketing at ZTE, has delivered a speech entitled "Key Technologies and Applications of Transport Network Slicing for 5G Industry Verticals" at the Layer123 World Congress.

Mr. Hu Junjie introduced the transport network slicing technologies of fine-granularity, Inband OAM,  intent-based automatic service provisioning and network simulation, which can assure accurate SLA and satisfy differentiated service requirements of 5G industry verticals. 

“Large-scale 5G network deployment and massive new services development require different network capabilities. To provide accurate control of latency guarantee, path selection, bandwidth assurance, service isolation and service security, the transport network adopts the slicing technology to connect the wireless and the core in 5G network slices,”  explained Mr. Hu Junjie. “The transport network slicing becomes an important part of the 5G network slicing by flexibly allocating transport network resources and providing customized network services for various scenarios.” 

Currently, transport slicing is divided into three types: statistical multiplexing slicing, soft isolation slicing, and hard isolation slicing, carrying 5G services with diverse SLA requirements for latency, bandwidth and security. For some industry verticals like finance and power electricity requiring completely exclusive bandwidth along with low latency and high security and reliability, the hard isolation slice (fine-granularity) is the optimal solution, featuring hard isolation, exclusive slice resource, fixed bandwidth, and low latency/jitter. 1*5G fine-granularity service layer can be planned on demand in some areas to create N*10M fine-granularity slices for future expansion. 

To satisfy differentiated SLA requirements of 5G services and improve the convenience and reliability of network slice deployment and O&M, the transport network slicing provides intelligent closed-loop O&M, which has the following features: 

Firstly, automatic on-demand service deployment. Based on the SLA, the solution can automatically select pre-configured templates in conformity with the bandwidth, packet loss rate and jitter requirements to implement flexible and automatic slice deployment. Besides, it supports cross-domain cross-DC slice deployment to configure different resources and services, including FlexE interfaces, VPN services and tunnels, for different slices. 

Secondly, SLA self-detection and guarantee. With the controller, the solution can collect and visualize the real-time slicing SLA, bandwidth, latency, and alarm information, to conduct thorough analysis, and dynamically detect slicing service quality. 

Thirdly, automatic optimization. Based on fault diagnosis, simulation and AI data analysis results, the solution can automatically optimize slices to guarantee SLA. 

“ZTE's intelligent O&M solution for transport slicing supports in-band flow-based detection to monitor each service in each slice in real time. According to the performance data such as packet loss and latency fed back by flow-based detection, the network and service quality changes can be detected, network alarms can be monitored, so that processing and optimization measures can be provided to ensure service self-healing and closed-loop, improve service reliability, and realize service SLA self-detection and guarantee,” added Mr. Hu Junjie.

In terms of automatic network and service optimization, the intelligent O&M solution simulates  network node faults or link failures of a real network  through mirrored slicing network data (e.g. traffic, topology, and service route). The simulation can pre-identify links with insufficient bandwidth resources, analyze network robustness and service survivability, guide capacity expansion, and pre-identify risks to facilitate daily O&M and capacity expansion planning of the slicing network, and increase network reliability and SLA guarantee. 

To date, ZTE has actively participated in the application of 5G slicing technologies, cooperated with its customers in many industry verticals, and achieved fruitful progress. Moving forward, ZTE will continue exploring AI in the industry, and apply innovations in different fields of new 5G services together with its partners, so that various industries can enjoy the convenience brought by 5G.