Background

Shaanxi Broadcast & TV Network Intermediary (Group) Co., Ltd. (SXBC) is the first provincial broadcast and TV network to achieve unified planning, construction, management, and operation. Over more than 10 years of innovation and development, the transmission backbone network in the province had grown and become highly complex. As a result, network security and maintenance challenges were increasing. O&M transformation was imperative.

Challenges

As services grew, SXBC’s transmission backbone network faced multiple challenges. One was that the optical fibers of this network covered a large area, so fault locating was slow. Another challenge was the lack of fault prevention methods due to optical cable attenuation, which caused unpredictable interruptions in services. One other challenge was that maintenance resources could not meet the network’s rapidly growing service requirements. The user experience was adversely affected over time.

Solution

To address SXBC’s network issues, Huawei is expanding the capacity of the transmission backbone network with WDM service solutions at 14 sites in the cities of Xi’an, Weinan, and Xianyang.

Huawei’s high-performance WDM management service is a comprehensive service solution that includes a network performance monitoring component, performance analysis platform, resource capacity optimization, network performance optimization, and O&M support. The network monitoring component consists of the Optical Doctor (OD) and Fiber Doctor (FD) tools and is deployed on the Network Management System (NMS) server with the WDM device.

Fiber Doctor uses a built-in Optical Time Domain Reflectometer (OTDR) function that locates faults within minutes with highly accurate remote detection. Faults are displayed with one click. The tool’s online fiber quality monitoring does not adversely affect services. Before failures occur, Fiber Doctor warns of performance deterioration and shows comparisons with historical performance data.

The higher-level Optical Doctor tool offers real-time optical-layer performance monitoring for prevention of failures. This is the industry’s only 100G End-to-End (E2E) online Optical Signal-to-Noise Ratio (OSNR) reliability detection solution. The tool requires no additional instruments, minimizing O&M costs, yet provides high measurement precision: ±0.5 dB. Optical Doctor reduces performance maintenance time from several days to just minutes.

Benefits

Huawei’s WDM performance management service helped SXBC transform WDM network O&M and ensure high-quality WDM performance. The Fiber Doctor’s quality detection and real-time fault diagnosis capabilities have greatly reduced service interruption time, without extra instrument investments.

With the Optical Doctor’s real-time capabilities, SXBC has optical-layer performance monitoring of WDM networks and optical cable attenuation. End-to-end optical-layer performance is displayed, with warnings and identification of service deterioration points. This proactive O&M improves maintenance efficiency and reduces the maintenance skills and resource requirements needed to keep the network running smoothly.