Building an Ultra-High-Speed, Highly-Reliable, and Intelligent Optical Transmission Network to Enable Digital Transformation of the Smart Aviation Hub
In this new era of digital and intelligent transformation, Hubei University needs to rebuild its campus network for teaching affairs, research, and administration. For this purpose, a future-oriented campus network with high concurrency, throughput, and reliability is required.
Tackling the Difficult: Campus Network Upgrade
Starting with Civil Engineering
Hubei University has more than 70 teaching buildings and 9800 rooms located on two campuses. The reconstruction scope was huge. The Wuchang main campus is located in the bustling downtown with complex pipelines for water, electricity, and natural gas. As the university was built many years ago, some original drawings cannot be found, posing great challenges to construction planning. Faced with this challenge, Hubei University teamed up with Huawei to work out emergency plans for scenarios such as cutting water pipelines or electric cables by mistake. On the other hand, engineers tried to collect old drawings and visit senior teachers to understand the general direction and distribution of underground pipelines. Through these efforts, the team largely understood the underground environment.
Phased and Imperceptible Migration by Area
The legacy network could not be all cut off at once. So how to migrate services from the legacy network to the new network without affecting normal network services was another key problem. To solve this problem, Hubei University adopts the strategy of phased and imperceptible migration by area. First, the two campuses were divided into different areas by function, such as living and teaching areas, so that service migration could be performed gradually by area. Another strategy was to migrate services during off-peak hours, such as early in the morning. In this way, Hubei University completed the deployment and service provisioning of its fiber to the office (FTTO) network which includes 9000+ Wi-Fi 7 access points (APs) on two campuses in only 120 days. It is the world’s first FTTO 10G campus network that uses the XGS-PON Pro+ technology and latest Wi-Fi 7 APs on a large scale.
Specific Migration Policies for Each Dedicated Network
Hubei University has several dedicated networks for the finance, all-in-one card, healthcare, and e-book services. These networks have specific networking and security requirements. Before service migration, engineers conducted an in-depth analysis on the service requirements, network architecture, and security requirements of each dedicated network, and worked out migration policies accordingly. In addition, they set up emergency plans for each dedicated network to ensure normal service running in case something went wrong during the migration. Through these measures, various dedicated networks were smoothly migrated, and no service was affected during the migration.
Convergence Upgrade for a Smarter Campus Network
The legacy campus network used to have four problems, poor Wi-Fi experience, aged network cables difficult to upgrade, low bandwidth overstretch to cope with traffic growth, and complex network difficult to manage and maintain. Using the innovative FTTO architecture, Hubei University integrated the wireless network, Ethernet, and optical network, solving the preceding problems once and for all.
FTTO Building a Green Information Highway
Up to now, Hubei University is the first benchmark project in higher education institutions with campus network XGS PON Pro+ campus OTN single-wavelength 100G interconnection, with 10G fiber directly reaching every classroom, library, laboratory, etc. In the FTTO network architecture, traditional active switches are replaced with compact passive optical splitters that do not require power supply, reducing the equipment room space usage, and saving energy consumption by about 30%. Full-fiber deployment can meet smooth evolution requirements in the next 30 years, which is economic and environment friendly.
Smart O&M Safeguarding Network Operations
To safeguard network services for many devices and access users, Huawei’s visualized network management platform iMaster NCE can accurately locate faults and visualize and manage network information in real time, simplifying O&M. ONUs are plug-and-play and can go online in minutes, simplifying network deployment.
iMaster NCE uses big data and AI technologies to detect network status in real time, locate and resolve potential problems in advance, and ensure smooth experience in services such as online teaching and video conferencing. The system visualizes user experience in real time and displays the network status of each area based on multi-dimensional network health indicators. Once a fault is detected, the system can quickly locate the specific user, device, or network link that is affected, providing accurate fault information for network O&M personnel to rectify the fault in a timely manner.
High Concurrency and Premium Network Experience
Hubei University uses Huawei AirEngine Wi-Fi 7 to achieve an access rate of up to 3.3 Gbit/s on each terminal. In high-density classroom scenarios, a single device can allow 30 STAs to stream 4K videos at the same time. The advanced multi-link operation (MLO) technology uses multiple frequency bands to transmit data to STAs, allowing users to enjoy HD video services without frame freezing and download ultra-large files in seconds.
Today, with the emergence of diversified network services, such as smart teaching, self-service learning, and mobile office, the next-generation FTTO network provides teachers and students with convenient information services in teaching, research, daily life, and social networking scenarios.
