Huawei Bets On Optical Slicing

Get ready for optical slicing in defining future optical transport networks, says Huawei.

In a recent keynote, Richard Jin, president of Huawei’s Transmission and Access Product Line, believed the new technology could improve “deterministic service experience” and drive industry transformation. He also believes that it will be a suitable candidate for upgrading synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) for power grids and transportation industries.

It is the first time Huawei proposed optical slicing for next-gen optical transport networks. It follows work done on the Huawei Liquid OTN-based optical slicing.

In his speech, titled “Intelligent Connectivity: the Digital Artery of Industry Intelligent Twins,” Jin notes that as services diversify in the power grid and transportation industries, innovations will demand higher bandwidth, lower latency, and greater network reliability.

“Optical network is the most deterministic communication mode. Industries with high deterministic requirements, such as power grid and transportation, generally use traditional SDH technology with multi-level mapping and limited speed. Therefore, it cannot meet the differentiated service requirements of digital transformation,” said Jin.  

“In contrast, optical slicing technology based on Liquid OTN provides intelligent connectivity and is a much better choice.”

Jin also argued that while the global market saw explosive data growth, data is only valuable when it flows. For efficient transmission, China built the world’s longest and highest capacity ultra-high voltage direct current (UHVDC) system. Optical slicing can help divide the massive bandwidth of optical fibers into different isolated slices, and services enjoy exclusive channels.

This approach eliminates interference and network congestion while delivering differentiated and deterministic bandwidth for services, said Jin.

Huawei is no stranger to the advancement of optical transport technologies. It continues to see its Liquid OTN as crucial for promoting the commercialization of optical slicing as it inherits physical isolation from SDH by offering two advantages:

• It uses OSU encapsulation technology to merge three layers into two and cuts device latency by 30% when compared with SDH.
• The converged architecture that combines the SDH and OTN technologies provides small-granularity slices and ultra-broadband. A slice size can then be adjusted on-demand in real-time from 2 Mbps to 100 Gbps without impacting services.

Currently, energy, transportation, finance, education, and government sectors use Huawei OptiXtrans E6600 that features Liquid OTN optical slicing technology.

Image credit: iStockphoto/NiPlot