Huawei High-Quality 10 Gbps CloudCampus Takes Network O&M Experience to New Levels Huawei iMaster NCE Digital Map Simplifies Campus Network O&M

Zhong Cui

Senior Marketing Manager of Huawei iMaster NCE

Huawei's Intelligent World 2030 predicts that by 2030, there will be 200 billion connections worldwide, and cloud services will account for 87% of enterprise application expenditure. In the digital economy era, there is an explosion in network nodes, making network management more difficult than ever. However, the number of network operations and maintenance (O&M) personnel of enterprises does not increase at the same rate, putting immense pressure on the O&M workforce.

Today, tens of thousands of network devices and millions of IoT terminals are connected, creating a huge workload for O&M personnel. Conventional network O&M relies heavily on individual expertise and so cannot efficiently detect network health, resulting in poor user experience and frequent complaints. Worse yet, it takes more than one day to demarcate and locate faults causing video conference lag. This is far behind the pace of enterprise digital transformation.

In response to these pain points, Huawei introduces the digital map function of iMaster NCE. Unlike the static network topology used in conventional O&M, Huawei iMaster NCE uses a network digital map to provide a four-dimensional view of networks, terminals, users, and applications. This map helps locate root causes with one click, avoiding maintenance problems caused by manual analysis. Based on key technologies such as big data computing engine, AI, and search algorithms, it provides four-dimensional campus visibility, fast fault demarcation and locating, and deterministic application experience assurance. This helps customers to implement O&M based on a dynamic high-definition electronic map instead of the static topology. In this way, customers can intuitively perceive networks through the digital map for improved efficiency of enterprise campus network O&M.

E2E One-Map Visibility

In large supermarket chains, wired, wireless, and branch networks are typically separate. With only a few people maintaining a multitude of devices, network faults may go undetected for some time, severely affecting service development in today's Internet era. Against this backdrop, Huawei iMaster NCE uses a network digital map to clearly display the experience for network elements (NEs), users, terminals, and applications, as well as quickly locate root causes of faults. As well as saving time and effort, this helps to avoid maintenance problems caused by manual analysis. In particular, holographic visibility (from links to terminals/users and then to applications) not only intuitively displays the latency, jitter, and packet loss rate of different networks, but also detects the network-wide experience status of users, terminals, and applications in real time. In addition, AI and big data analytics are applied to enable direct mapping and visibility between campus services and network faults. This can help to quickly resolve network faults and provide the best connection experience in the retail industry.

Secure Management of Numerous Terminals

In the education industry, as smart teaching and campus services evolve, as well as traditional devices like cameras and turnstiles, new terminals are added, such as those for smart access control and teaching recording. Hundreds of thousands of terminals are scattered all around the campus. Conventional terminal management on such a campus network suffers from problems such as massive manual access, painstaking security assurance, and difficult statistics. In this context, Huawei iMaster NCE uses a unique network digital map to intelligently identify myriad IoT terminals and automatically match access control policies. It can also quickly and accurately detect unauthorized access locations and isolate abnormal terminals, thereby ensuring reliable network-wide access.

Specifically, the system uses the accurate terminal identification capability to identify specific terminal types and automatically match access control policies. This makes terminals plug-and-play, allowing them to automatically and securely access the network. At the same time, the system continuously learns the traffic baseline of terminal behavior. When a terminal displays abnormal behavior such as unauthorized or forged access, the campus digital map associates with devices to accurately locate the physical location of the terminal within 30 seconds. It can also provide the terminal anomaly analysis and recommend a terminal isolation policy, thereby ensuring the campus network security.

Real-Time Application and VIP User Service Assurance

In enterprise office scenarios, remote working with video conferencing has become a must-have application for enterprises. However, there is video lag and garbled voice in key video conferences. Demarcating and locating faults is difficult, and fixing them takes a long time. As a result, the IT director often takes the blame.

Huawei iMaster NCE digital map for campus networks works with devices to analyze the quality of each data flow of key applications using the packet conservation algorithm for Internet (iPCA). This can provide hop-by-hop packet loss statistics and visibility of all forwarding nodes from Wi-Fi access to campus egress. Once a fault occurs, the failure point can be quickly and accurately located. In addition, based on AI-powered big data analytics, full-journey analysis and scenario-specific baseline evaluation are performed for VIP users to proactively generate warnings before their experience deteriorates. This ensures a superior network experience for VIP users anytime, anywhere, on any device.

A top-ranked university in China deployed Huawei's digital map feature to detect poor quality of experience (QoE) on the entire network in real time and provide network assurance for more than 10,000 teachers and students, and in doing so improved campus network satisfaction. The digital map offers visibility into users, things, applications, and networks. It also proactively detects faults, as well as quickly demarcating and locating them. In the six months since the deployment, no faults have been reported by students, download speeds in dormitories have more than tripled, and high-definition videos no longer freeze when played online, improving students' network experience.

In addition, users' network experience and journey are recorded in real time. When troubleshooting students' network problems, O&M personnel only need to use the student ID to search for the access time, connected device, and network signal quality, after which the cause is automatically analyzed. This greatly reduces the time required for troubleshooting network problems. By replacing passive O&M with proactive experience assurance, network O&M personnel no longer take the blame, and are even celebrated.

Huawei iMaster NCE digital map provides a converged management, control, and analysis platform for all scenarios, including the enterprise headquarters campus, production campus, and branch offices. This platform enables unified management of wired, wireless, and SD-WAN networks, visualizes faults on one map, and directly locates root causes. It can also secure access of end users and assure E2E video and VIP user experience, thereby taking campus network experience to new levels.

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.