Huawei and Partners Jointly Release the fgOTN White Paper for Electric Power，Promote Next-Generation Electric Power Communication Network Standards

[Dubai, UAE, October 15, 2024] At GITEX GLOBAL 2024 in Dubai, during the summit themed "Leading Infrastructure to Accelerate Electric Power Intelligence", Huawei, together with 3W Networks and HIMARK, released the fgOTN White Paper for Electric Power (referred to as the White Paper), aiming to promote the digital and intelligent transformation of the electric power industry.

Nick Liu, Vice President of Enterprise Optical Domain, Huawei, emphasized in his speech that the global electric power industry is undergoing digital and intelligent transformation. As the digital and intelligent infrastructure of electric power, communication networks are the basis for automatic power grid dispatching, market-oriented network operations, and modern management, and can help to ensure secure, stable, and economical operations of power grids. Electric power communication networks must be highly reliable, evolvable, and efficient to carry existing power production services and future intelligent services. Huawei cooperates with global electric power companies to gain insights into the development trends of electric power services and leverage Huawei's expertise in the optical communications field. Based on the next-generation industry communication network standards, Huawei and partners jointly released the fgOTN White Paper for Electric Power together, aiming to help the electric power industry overcome challenges and accelerate digital and intelligent transformation.

The digital and intelligent transformation of the electric power industry requires electric power communication networks to carry production network services — including teleprotection, dispatch phone, and security and stability control systems — to ensure high reliability and deterministic low latency of production networks. In addition, service interfaces as well as configuration and maintenance practices must be kept unchanged to reduce migration difficulties and OPEX. Moreover, in the future, electric power communication networks must carry various intelligent services such as situational awareness and IoT to ensure that service bandwidth can meet intelligence requirements and improve service bearing flexibility. ITU-T has released a series of standards for fine-grain Optical Transport Network (fgOTN) — the next-generation technology for SDH evolution — to meet the high reliability, deterministic low latency, and high efficiency requirements of small-granularity services, such as electric power services, under an OTN system framework. Moreover, fgOTN can flexibly expand network bandwidth for future-oriented digital and intelligent development, supporting the access of both production network services and new digital and intelligent services. This makes it an ideal solution for digital and intelligent network construction of power grids and SDH network upgrades.

According to the White Paper, the fgOTN technology can be used to implement unified all-optical bearing of power backbone, power transmission and transformation, power distribution, and power transformation campus networks, achieving highly reliable bearing of network services at each layer. As for the architecture, fgOTN provides end-to-end one-hop connection from the power distribution and transformation campus to the backbone network to ensure high service reliability, protect investment, and reduce OPEX. Specifically, fgOTN stands out in the electric power industry with the following highlights:

fgOTN, which has high service reliability, will be the network construction standard of power production networks for the next decade. Major electric power companies have used hard pipe technologies to carry key power production services. The latency is stable and reliable, and is not affected by the network state, meeting the strict latency requirements of teleprotection services. fgOTN, released by ITU-T at the end of 2023, is the latest hard pipe technology. It is the only international standard that carries power production control services in addition to SDH, ensuring high security and reliability of electric power services.

fgOTN performance has been verified and applied by benchmark customers. fgOTN has been used by five provincial branches of China to carry key services such as teleprotection. Additionally, it has improved the bandwidth and service bearing efficiency of power backbone transmission networks.

fgOTN supports smooth network expansion and evolution, protecting customer investment.For existing SDH devices, fgOTN supports on-demand smooth reconstruction and evolution on a per-site, per-chain, or per-ring basis. Huawei has been working in the optical network field for nearly 30 years, and has had the world's largest market share in optical transmission networks for 16 consecutive years. Huawei has been working closely with global electric power companies to drive productivity with communications technologies. Huawei works with partners to provide secure, stable, and reliable power communication network solutions for many electric power companies over 70 countries, helping accelerate the digital and intelligent transformation of the electric power industry.

For details about the fgOTN White Paper for Electric Power, please visit: https://e.huawei.com/en/material/optical/8e117dd97abf4236b4f0e7b0063282ec