Huawei and Shanghai Shentong Metro Group Release the World’s First Commercial Case of the Optical Transmission Network (OTN) Urban Rail Transit Network

[Berlin, Germany, September 19, 2018] Together with Shanghai Shentong Metro Group Co., LTD, Huawei comprehensively analyzed the metro network operational communication bearer and backbone communication; shared the planning and project best practice for the Shanghai Rail Transit Information Network; and officially released the world’s first commercial case in the field of urban rail oriented OTN powered high-speed bearer network.

From left to right: Frédéric Comtet, Director of Huawei Transportation Solution Unit, Yuan Xilin, Vice President of Industry Solution Dept, Huawei Enterprise Business Group, Liu Chunjie, Chief Engineer of Shanghai Shentong Metro Group Co., Ltd, Norman Frisch, Director of Huawei Business Development & Marketing Transport Solution

After more than 20 years of rapid development, Shanghai Metro operates 16 metro lines and one maglev line, with a total length of 673 km, controls 395 stations and is recognized as the metro operator with the largest metro network. With the increase of construction scale, in recent years, Shanghai rail transport has gradually entered a new stage of network development characterized by rail network planning, construction, and operations. In 2016, Shanghai Metro began to optimize upper-layer networks of its existing Comprehensive Operation Coordination Center (COCC).

Shanghai Metro’s upper-layer communication networks face many difficulties, for example:

• Shanghai Metro has many different types of services and requires high bandwidth. Nearly 30 types of communication services exist between each line of Shentong’s Operations Control Center (OCC) and its COCC, such as the dedicated wireless systems, Automatic Train Supervision (ATS), Automatic Fare Collection (AFC), Passenger Information System (PIS), Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) and Office Automation (OA) systems. Additionally, providing sufficient speeds for subsequent Big Data strategies requires large bandwidth expansion.
• Shanghai Metro’s services are isolated and independent of each other. Its OTN powered high-speed bearer network business contains business units like operation management, dispatching, and driving guarantee which demands various levels of security respectively. Therefore, physical isolation must be implemented between different business units to meet high security and reliability requirements.
• Shanghai Metro’s large-scale network requires high availability. The entire urban rail cloud consists of the transmission platform, data operation execution networks, data operation management networks and low-speed data service networks. The network design’s unprecedented scale covers all OCC nodes in Shanghai. As the entire network’s cornerstone, the transmission network needs to be highly reliable and ensure timely switchovers to run services continuously in case of faults.

Based on the detailed mainstream technology comparisons and rigorous demonstrations, Shanghai Metro finally chose Huawei’s advanced OTN solution to build its upper-layer communication transmission network, which was implemented and put into commercial use in 2018.

     1. The system capacity easily upgrades to the terabit level to meet service volume expansion requirements within 5 to 10 years.

     2. Wavelength + ODUK + VC three physical isolation solutions ensure service transmission security and provide end-to-end bandwidth guarantees suitable for important service transmissions like ATS. 

     3. The network not only supports equipment- and network-level protections, but also smoothly upgrades to an ASON network to further improve service reliability. 

Liu Chunjie, Chief Engineer of Shanghai Shentong Metro Group Co., Ltd, said, “Huawei has been participating in the construction of the high-speed bearer network in Shanghai Metro Lines 14, 15, and 18, indicating their industry expertise and comprehensive strength. We expect Huawei to be a leader in the next round of rail transportation construction.”