As AI technologies become all-pervasive, they are starting to impact service development and digital intelligence transformation across a range of industry sectors, in turn imposing ever greater demands on existing enterprise and carrier network infrastructures.
Wide-area networks (WANs) in the form of IP WANs, have traditionally been the foundation for the intelligent enterprise network, and today’s cloud WANs are able to support massive service demands with differentiated requirements for aspects such as bandwidth and latency.
With more new AI-based services being introduced however, traditional IP WANs are facing huge challenges, warns Huawei. While traffic volumes from the enterprise to the intelligent computing center can be expected to increase sharply, operators are also accelerating the construction of computing centers to provide services for thousands of industries, many of which are increasing their own computing infrastructure to integrate AI into their applications.
Different service flows will have a far-reaching impact on networks, bring new traffic models, and pose higher requirements and challenges on IP networks, says Huawei. In response, the vendor has introduced the Xinghe Intelligent WAN, based on its Xinghe Intelligent router technology, describing it as “a breakthrough that both addresses the multiple technical bottlenecks encountered by traditional IP WANs, and supports the development potential of AI across a range of industry sectors”.
For a fuller picture of the company’s new Intelligent WAN offering, we spoke to Zuo Meng, Vice President of Huawei’s Datacom Product Line.
How is the accelerated adoption of AI across multiple industry sectors creating challenges for traditional enterprise networks?
As we know, the WAN serves as a bridge between the campus network and the cloud, supporting all production and office systems of an enterprise. However, traditional IP WANs are not only unable to match the explosive growth in traffic, they can also no longer fulfill demands such as identifying VIP services and ensuring a VIP service experience. And as networks become more complex, O&M methods as applied in traditional IP WANs are becoming less effective at monitoring and diagnosing network problems in real time.
As AI technologies enable thousands of industries to achieve service development and digital intelligence transformation across a range of industry sectors, this is posing even greater requirements on IP WANs.
How can the challenges you mentioned above be solved?
The challenge is to break through these multiple, technical bottlenecks. By employing its Xinghe Intelligent router technology, Huawei has create an intelligent network that integrates wide coverage, ultimate experience, and AI O&M to ensure data transmission in the new AI era.The Xinghe Intelligent WAN can allow the continuous application of greater development potential in various industries such as government, transportation, electric power, ISP, and intelligent computing.
What is innovative about Xinghe Intelligent WAN and what benefits does it offer?
The Xinghe Intelligent WAN solution was introduced at the Huawei Connect 2024 event in Shanghai during September. The solution consists of three key parts:
Firstly, it provides a comprehensive choice of service ports, ranging from 64 kbit/s to 800 Gbit/s, and integrates PDH, SDH, and IP interfaces. In terms of wide coverage, Huawei’s access routers support unified wired and wireless access and IPv6+ capabilities, which can be extended to rural areas, helping customers achieve optimal TCO and fully inclusive network coverage.
Secondly, by providing SRv6 and slicing, the new solution ensures a dedicated service experience and isolated key services. The Xinghe Intelligent WAN also supports differentiated assurance capabilities including application assurance (whereby AI awareness is added to improve the application identification rate to 98%), and experience-level assurance (upgraded from link-level).
In addition, the intelligent flow load balancing algorithm boosts link utilization from 40% to 98%, while Xsec and IPsec encryption capabilities are improved by 70%. By Implementing self-optimization of key service experiences, Huawei helps customers achieve an optimal experience with end-to-end security.
Thirdly, the new solution provides digital map 2.0, which supports six-dimensional network visualization and online configuration verification, greatly improving network O&M efficiency. AI-based intelligent O&M provides network assurance, network health dimensions, predictive inspection, and automatic broadcast of potential risks.
Which industries have adopted Xinghe Intelligent WAN?
Demand and performance requirements for WANs are growing alongside the business development and digital intelligence transformation of various industries. E-government and public services, for example, are being extended to smaller towns and villages, which requires large-scale network capabilities to be quickly deployed, and the service deployment in districts and counties needs to be simplified. Video conferencing experience assurance and the security isolation of important and sensitive services are mandatory.
For the energy sector, the development of IP-based networks means that service partition management, zero interruption of production services, and simplified O&M are required. Networks must be capable of differentiated security isolation and simplified and intelligent O&M.
In the transportation industry, the continuous refinement of train scheduling services and the emergence of new services such as ultra-HD video surveillance pose higher requirements on WAN flexibility, reliability, and on-demand throughput. Other industries, such as the financial and mining industries, are all facing changes in new services, scenarios, and technologies.
What do you think about the future prospects for this solution?
Traditional WANs need to be upgraded and reconstructed. The Xinghe Intelligent WAN continues to exert greater development potential in various industries such as government, transportation, electric power, ISP, and intelligent computing.
In the future, the wave of intelligence brought by AI is setting off a new round of industry transformation. Huawei's data communication cloud WAN will continue to innovate, build leading solutions and products, activate digital potential, and support intelligent industry transformation.
From October 14 to 18, Huawei will participate in the GITEX Global 2024, one of the world's largest technology exhibitions, as a Diamond Sponsor. With the theme of "Accelerate Industrial Digitalization and Intelligence", Huawei will launch a series of flagship products and solutions for the global enterprise markets, Reference Architecture for Intelligent Transformation, and rich innovative practices in digital intelligence in the global industry.
At the same time, Huawei will hold the Huawei Industrial Digital and Intelligent Transformation Summit 2024, dozens of forums, hundreds of talks and keynote speeches, exchanging thoughts with the industry. At this exhibition, Huawei's booth is located at B10&B20, Hall 22, Dubai World Trade Center. It covers an area of more than 1400 square meters, with the focuses on two themes: " Accelerate Industrial Digitalization and Intelligence" and "Leading Digtial and Intelligent Infrastructure". The Xinghe Intelligent WAN solution will also be shown there. We sincerely welcome you to join us in our journey to accelerate industrial digitalization and intelligence. For more information, please visit https://e.huawei.com/ae/events/branding/gitex.
