Campuses — the fundamental building blocks of our cities — are the most important places that gather people and industries. According to Huawei's enterprise business market insight, more than 90% of urban residents work and live inside campuses, and over 80% of a country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and 90% of innovations are created on campuses. It can be said that everything in our cities, except roads, is composed of campuses.
Today's campus management scope is expanding, with more managed objects and more complex services than ever before. However, the limited campus infrastructures and service capabilities are increasingly mismatched with people's growing production and life needs.
Networks are the most important infrastructure needed to enable campus services. A smart campus requires an "everything-aware" converged network so that people, things, and services in the campus are no longer isolated. Instead, they unite as a whole, interacting with and affecting each other. Furthermore, inter-system collaboration, information interaction, and service convergence become the norm. Such interaction and convergence create added value. However, after multiple service networks are converged, they inevitably take on new service development trends and face unprecedented challenges.
• High-performance Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) are required to support future-proof office and production services.
• New network architecture and transmission media are required as one single campus network is carrying multiple services
• Enterprise cloud-based transformation accelerates, and the number of applications increases rapidly, presenting new challenges to enterprise WANs in terms of networking, application experience assurance, and security.
• The fast-growing audio and video services pose higher requirements on campus network quality and O&M.
To help address these challenges, Huawei proposed the concept of "High-Quality 10 Gbps Campus Network".
• What does "high quality" mean?
High-quality terminal access: Both wired and wireless access must be fast enough and meet current and future service needs. In addition, terminal access must be speedy and, more importantly, secure to eliminate hidden risks arising from unauthorized terminals.
High-quality network architecture: Compared with traditional three-layer network architecture, high-quality network architecture is further flattened. Devices can be directly deployed onto desktops, facilitating flexible port expansion and improving ease of use for users and administrators.
High-quality enterprise branches: To go global, enterprises have to build branches around the world. They need to connect global branches more conveniently and ensure uncompromised experience at branches even when the Internet quality is poor.
High-quality experience: Networks are built to serve users, and high-quality networks mean better user experience. For example, a high-quality network should ensure smooth video conferences and guaranteed VIP user experience. And networks should be more intelligent, enabling O&M personnel to handle faults more efficiently with optimized experience.
• What does "10 Gbps campus network" mean?
10 Gbps to office: This means the network speed in an office or room reaches 10 Gbps. With the rise of Virtual Reality (VR)-based immersive conferences, the bandwidth of a single user reaches 800 Mbps. If 10 users are connected to an AP, 8 Gbps traffic is generated. In this case, the AP needs to offer 10 Gbps capabilities. Similarly, in a wired classroom, there are 10 to 13 information points, with each having several hundred Mbps of traffic. The total bandwidth needed for the classroom also reaches 10 Gbps.
10 Gbps to production: In Automated Optical Inspection (AOI) scenarios, there are about 143 AOI devices per thousand square meters, with each requiring a bandwidth of more than 100 Mbps. If the AOI device concurrency rate is 60%, the bandwidth required per thousand square meters is 8.6 Gbps. This means 10 Gbps is also required in production scenarios. In scenarios where HD industrial IP Cameras (IPCs) are required, such as automobile production lines, each IPC requires a bandwidth of 2.5 Gbps. If there are four IPCs on a single production line, the bandwidth required also reaches 10 Gbps.
10 Gbps to branch: Each SaaS HD video channel requires a bandwidth of 160 Mbps. If there are 50 concurrent users at an enterprise branch, the bandwidth required reaches 8 Gbps. As such, branches need to upgrade from 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps to support cloud-based services.
A truly high-quality network solution offers more than fast connections and also needs a more complex metrics system. In this way, users gain tangible benefits in deployment, services, experience, and O&M during campus network architecture upgrade.
The concept of "high-quality 10 Gbps campus network" builds on four criteria: ultra-high-speed access, simplified architecture, simplified branch, and ultimate experience. This aligns with future-facing campus network design and paves the way for building smart campus networks needed to accelerate digital upgrade of enterprise services.
• Ultra-high-speed access
Huawei Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 7 APs draw on industry-leading technologies, such as dynamic-zoom smart antennas and multi-AP Coordinated Spatial Reuse (CoSR), to achieve up to 10 Gbps wireless bandwidth, enabling network access anytime, anywhere.
To keep up with IoT adoption, Huawei APs come with built-in IoT cards for Wi-Fi and IoT convergence, enabling IoT terminals to quickly access the network.
Huawei is also the first to apply Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to terminal identification to identify network terminal types and detect terminal spoofing. This ensures secure terminal access to the network and eliminates potential network risks caused by unauthorized terminals.
• Simplified architecture
To flatten and simplify traditional three-layer network architecture, Huawei takes the lead in proposing the two-layer architecture that consists of the central switch and remote units (RUs), with RUs serving as the extended ports of the central switch. Powered by unique 2000 m PoE technology, RUs can be directly deployed onto desktops, facilitating flexible port expansion. RUs are plug-and-play and require no management or maintenance. They adopt a fanless natural heat dissipation design to achieve super quietness and energy saving.
• Simplified branch
In line with globalization, enterprises have to build branches around the world. In this process, they need to connect branches more conveniently and build high-quality branch networks. To this end, they urgently look for simplified devices, management, and deployment. Huawei's Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) gateway is the industry's first 6-in-1 gateway that integrates routing, switching, Power over Ethernet (PoE), firewall, Intrusion Prevention System (IPS)/antivirus, and 5G functions. One such device is sufficient for a small branch network. Furthermore, Huawei's iMaster NCE platform centrally manages 20,000 branches, meaning one platform suffices for one network. Another highlight is that Huawei's SD-WAN solution uses site templates for batch site deployment. With the help of 5G capabilities, 1000 sites can be quickly configured within one day, achieving zero-wait service provisioning.
• Ultimate experience
Networks are built to serve users. With this in mind, Huawei develops the innovative intelligent multimedia scheduling technology on APs and switches. This technology uses an AI engine to automatically identify and preferentially guarantee audio and video conferences. In this way, video conferences remain smooth even when the network is congested. The experience assurance card on the CloudEngine S8700 switch prevents packet loss in the case of heavy traffic bursts.
In addition to end-user experience, network administrators' O&M experience is also important. Powered by big data and AI, Huawei's iMaster NCE visualizes network status and user experience, and automatically detects and locates faults, improving O&M efficiency by several times.
Summary
In the past, campus network solutions were designed based on enterprise scale. However, as digitalization accelerates across industries, enterprise scale is no longer the only factor. Enterprises of all sizes now pursue a high-quality network that can provide superior user experience. A high-quality campus network should center on enterprise application scenarios and smooth evolution to the future instead.
Huawei stands ready to better support the digital transformation of global enterprises. To this end, Huawei continues to dive into emerging technologies, such as AI, Machine Learning (ML), and Wi-Fi 7to build up competitiveness and provides strong support for campus network deployment, O&M, touch-free terminal access, and user experience assurance.
Huawei is a strong advocate of fully-wireless transformation of traditional workplaces which proactively promotes the IP-based and fully-wireless upgrades of the manufacturing industry to achieve flexible production for higher production efficiency.
In workplace scenarios, Huawei's iMaster NCE — a platform that integrates management, control, and analysis — collects and analyzes network, device, and user experience data in real time. In this way, campus networks become autonomous driving, making network services as easily available as air and water.
In production scenarios, Huawei leverages industry-leading Wi-Fi 7 technology to provide stable connections with ultra-high reliability and ultra-low latency, thereby transforming production and manufacturing equipment wirelessly.
The new era where everything is connected is approaching soon, an end-to-end high-quality campus network will become vital for enterprises to realize digital transformation.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position, products, and technologies of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. If you need to learn more about the products and technologies of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., please visit our website at e.huawei.com or contact us.
