Shenzhen Toplink Technology Co.,Ltd.

[China, Shanghai, June 28, 2019] During the MWC19 Shanghai, China Unicom Beijing Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Beijing Unicom) and Huawei successfully completed the world's first 5G bearer flow detection program iFIT (In-situ Flow Information Telemetry) pilot With millisecond-level flow detection, real-time perception of service quality agreement (SLA), to achieve silent fault second-level positioning, support business rapid recovery, help Beijing Unicom to create intelligent visual 5G bearer network.

In the 5G era, various new services that are booming have placed higher demands on network quality. For example, VR/AR services require more bandwidth (80-260 Mbps) and lower packet loss rate (10-5-10-6). The operator's business model also needs to change from selling network bandwidth to sales service experience. How to protect the user's service experience will be a major challenge for the bearer network. In the field of network operation and maintenance, the traditional detection method uses an indirect test method to send analog test packets. It cannot guarantee that the analog packets are consistent with the real service path, and cannot completely reflect the SLA of the service level. In particular, it cannot capture a small amount of packets. In the case of a silent fault, the service packet loss detection accuracy can only reach 10-3. In the future, when the AR/VR service is lost, the fault may not be detected. Moreover, the traditional information collection period is in the order of minutes, and it is required to be passively positioned after the service fails or the quality is degraded, resulting in a positioning period of several hours, days, or even weeks.

Huawei proposes an innovative iFIT flow detection solution, which uses hardware to identify subtle anomalies in the network based on real-time service traffic, and accurately detects performance information such as service delay and packet loss rate. The service packet loss detection accuracy can reach 10-6. Compared with the traditional detection method, the precision is increased by a thousand times. With Telemetry millisecond data acquisition, the network quality SLA can be visualized in real time, enabling fast fault demarcation and positioning, which can effectively meet the SLA appeal of 5G new services such as AR/VR.

In October 2018, Huawei submitted a draft framework for iFIT, the In-Situ Flow Information Telemetry Framework, at the IETF standards organization. This is the industry's first fully-featured flow-through detection solution for commercial deployment. In June 2019, Huawei's flow detection program iFIT won the 2019 Interop Tokyo Special Award, which fully demonstrated that the technology has been highly recognized by the industry.

In this pilot, Beijing Unicom is based on Huawei's iFIT solution. The forwarding layer uses router networking. The control layer is based on the Network Cloud Engine (NCE) for visual verification. The network fault simulation is performed through the instrument, including ms. Level delay mutations, low probability packet loss, and tuning functions based on the above faults. The final result shows that whether the single message delay exceeds the threshold or only one packet is lost, the iFIT-based test solution can be accurately captured and presented on the NCE interface. The NCE analyzes the sampling information of iFIT milliseconds to implement fast path tuning.

"iFIT does not require an external probe. The KPI of the real service flow can be obtained hop by hop through the router service board, and the delay precision is very high. This is a big breakthrough in the carrier network operation and maintenance technology. With the recent 5G commercial With the issuance of licenses, the 5G process will accelerate, and the iFIT flow detection solution will play an important role in the SLA protection of the business,” said the manager of the Beijing Unicom Transmission Center.

"With the advent of 5G, the diversification of services and the differentiation of SLAs will bring huge challenges to the bearer network. The high-precision detection technology for 5G has always been the direction of our research. The success of the iFIT pilot with the flow detection scheme marks Huawei. And Beijing Unicom's level of innovation cooperation in the field of 5G bearer has reached a new level!” said Huang Xinyu, director of Huawei's 5G bearer solution.

Beijing Unicom and Huawei have been promoting 5G application innovation and building key investment in industrial ecology, and strive to break through the industrial bottleneck. On the basis of the 5G business application cooperation, the two parties will continue to deepen the joint innovation on the bearer side, continuously verify the new technologies and new features of 5G bearer, explore the 5G bearer construction mode and specifications, and lay the foundation for the upcoming 5G scale commercialization in the country. basis.