Huawei Industry-Dedicated Wireless Network (IDWN): Building a Foundation for Smart Industrial Parks

Sun Wei

Senrior Marketing Manager

Introduction:

At an oil and gas project site in the Middle East, the project team introduced drones and automated control systems to monitor and scan the topography, geological structure and potential reservoirs of oil and gas mining areas in real time through lidar, high-resolution cameras and other sensors. By combining the collected data with geological models and historical exploration data, artificial intelligence algorithms can accurately analyze and predict the distribution and recoverable reserves of oil and gas. Using remote control and autonomous decision-making technology, they have automated drilling, fracturing and pumping operations, reducing human error and safety risks, and significantly shortening exploration and production cycles.

The above is only a representative case in the process of digital transformation of the oil and gas mining industry. In today's era of rapid digital development, all industries are seeking to enhance their core competitiveness through technological innovation. Especially in typical industrial parks such as oil and gas mines, ports, airports, and manufacturing industries, traditional information networks cannot meet the increasing informatization requirements as the business scale continues to expand and the technology requirements continue to upgrade.

To meet new challenges, these industries are actively looking for more advanced network solutions. These industrial parks are often characterized by remote operation areas and complex working environments, which make them face many challenges in network construction.

• Limited coverage: Traditional wired networks and mobile public networks cannot cover all areas, especially remote or difficult to reach. According to a report by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), about 40 percent of industrial parks and small businesses around the world, especially in developing countries, do not have broadband Internet coverage.

• Insufficient stability: Common network devices are vulnerable to damage due to environmental factors (such as dust and temperature changes), resulting in unstable signal quality. According to a survey conducted by an international well-known equipment vendor, the failure rate of common network devices in high temperature environments is 30% higher than that in normal environments. Failure rates increase by approximately 25% under high humidity conditions.

• Lack of security measures: Data may be stolen during transmission due to lack of effective security measures. One study shows that more than 60% of security incidents in industrial environments are related to vulnerabilities in the data transfer process.

• High maintenance costs: The complex cabling structure not only increases the initial construction costs, but also poses great challenges to the later maintenance. For example, in the oil and gas mining industry, the maintenance costs of traditional wired networks are about 40% to 50% higher than that of wireless networks, according to reports from industry consulting firms.

To address these challenges, the industry urgently needs a next-generation communication solution that can adapt to complex environments and provide reliable connectivity. With years of accumulated technical strength and rich industry experience, Huawei launches the Huawei Industry-Dedicated Wireless Network (IDWN) campus network solution. This solution is dedicated to providing customized 4G/5G industry private network services for open-pit mines, ports, airports, and manufacturing campuses.

Advantages:

• Wide coverage and high bandwidth: Huawei's advanced wireless communication technologies are used to provide wide area coverage and support multiple high-bandwidth applications, such as HD video surveillance and remote control. In the test, Huawei's wireless private network can achieve an average signal coverage of 99.9% in open-pit mines and transmit data at a rate of up to 1 Gbit/s per second.

• Low latency and high reliability: The dedicated network design ensures low latency transmission of mission-critical data, ensuring overall system stability and reliability even in extreme conditions. Test results show that the real-time data transmission delay of Huawei industry-dedicated wireless network in open pit mines is less than 10 ms, and the reliability reaches 99.99%.

• Security protection system: The built-in multi-level security mechanism, including but not limited to encryption, access control, and identity authentication, effectively prevents data leakage and illegal intrusion and ensures enterprise information security. The encryption algorithm complies with international standards and can defend against more than 99.99% network attacks.

• Flexible deployment and easy management: Huawei's innovative integrated cabinet solution for campus private networks integrates baseband processing units (BBUs), core network devices, switches, network management systems, energy-efficient power units, and backup battery systems. This greatly simplifies the onsite deployment and maintenance process, reduces the installation cost and time, and improves the anti-interference capability and environment adaptability of the communication network. It is designed to cope with extreme climates and complex terrains, ensuring stable operation under dusty, high temperature difference, and high humidity conditions, and providing uninterrupted communication guarantee for key applications such as production safety, remote control, and automation in various industrial parks.

• Various device types: Huawei provides devices that cover various 3GPP standard frequency bands, including low, medium, and high frequencies, and millimeter wave. The devices support multiple network standards, including NB-IoT, 4G, and 5G. This ensures that network connection requirements in different application scenarios are met. These devices include multi-channel remote radio units (RRUs) and active antenna units (AAUs) with 64 transmit and receive channels (64T64R) to provide high-performance 5G coverage and quality of service. This diversified device combination not only adapts to the complex and changing environment in the industrial park, but also ensures stable and reliable network connections in different service scenarios.

Success Stories:

Since 2020, Huawei, as a strategic partner in informatization transformation of various enterprises, has built industry-specific wireless networks for multiple mining companies around the world and used high-performance wireless networks to deploy a series of advanced service applications, including:

• Driverless: It enables mining companies to realize the functions of independent loading and unloading of mining trucks, car avoidance, collaborative operation of vehicles and excavating machinery, intelligent ore distribution and scheduling, and effectively improves the performance of mines in terms of safety, production capacity and production management. It also greatly reduces the need for field operators.

• Remote control: Through the remote control system carried by the wireless private network, the operating status of the electric shovel and drilling rig can be monitored in real time, and control instructions can be sent through the remote cockpit. To realize automatic rotation, one-click leveling, precise positioning of drilling, automatic replacement of drill pipe, automatic cable winding and other operations. This allows mining companies to evacuate front-line operators from hazardous areas, significantly reducing operational risk.

• UAV service: The real-time data transmission function of multi-purpose UAVs is used to implement mining area survey, surveillance, and automatic inspection, meeting the requirements of multiple scenarios, improving work efficiency and further reducing work risks.

• Predictive maintenance: Combined with the wireless private network and industrial gateway, mining enterprises can collect the operation data of mining equipment in real time, and then establish a fault prediction model to monitor the health status of equipment and perform preventive maintenance, effectively reducing unplanned downtime, shortening maintenance cycle, and prolonging the service life of equipment.

To sum up, these innovative services take advantage of the advantages of large bandwidth, low latency, and high reliability of the industry wireless private network not only significantly improve work efficiency, but also greatly reduce security risks in the working environment, fully meeting the requirements of mines in different application scenarios.

Concluding remarks:

In the wave of digital transformation, Huawei industry-dedicated wireless network not only provides solid technical support for industries such as open-pit mines, ports, airports, and manufacturing, but also builds a future-oriented intelligent network platform and accelerates the digital transformation of various industries. With the continuous progress and improvement of technologies, Huawei's wireless private network will bring transformative opportunities to more industries and help them achieve high-quality development.

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.