Huawei unveils SDN solutions and technologies to drive network evolution

SANTA CLARA, USA: Huawei has unveiled a number of key software-defined networking (SDN) solutions and technologies based on the framework of SoftCOM at the Open Networking Summit (ONS) 2014 in Santa Clara.

These include a SDN-based next-generation virtual network (NG-VN), the first carrier-level SDN flow engine, and Protocol Oblivious Forwarding (POF) technologies for data centers, demonstrating Huawei's leading role in the SDN evolution.

Introduced in 2012 against the backdrop of emerging cloud technologies and the explosive growth of digital data, Huawei's SoftCOM strategy and solutions help carriers around the world navigate the challenges of improving efficiency, reducing costs, and creating new business opportunities in a time of cloud, virtualization and ICT convergence.

Huawei has been conducting all-out research and development efforts in the SDN sector in order to continuously offer new technologies that overcome these challenges. Huawei showcased, for the first time, a SDN-based IP and optical synergy solution which adopts a unified network controller to automatically detect and maintain resources at the IP and optical layers, together with resources between the layers.

In addition to supporting automatic deployment of service routes over layers to expedite service provisioning and eliminating complex horizontal signaling to simplify network devices, Huawei's solution also supports various network requirements and resource usage restraints to ensure that service-level agreements (SLAs) are met and realizes unified optimization of cross-layer network resources and quick detection and recovery of network faults. As a cutting-edge SDN-based solution, Huawei's SDN-based IP and optical synergy enables highly efficient synergy and automation between IP and optical networks

Huawei's SDN-based NG-VN is a virtualized E2E IP network solution that enables virtualization of all devices and links and also provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Network as a Service (NaaS). NG-VN supports dynamic modification, expansion, and upgrade of the virtual network without perceiving the physical network topology or the virtual network services. It also allows the virtual network to migrate dynamically and eliminate network faults, creating a "fault-free" virtual network.

The SDN flow engine has been a key breakthrough for the SDN algorithm as it calculates the best route for a service according to requirements on service quality (bandwidth/latency), and quickly detects dynamic traffic changes to automatically adjust network traffic. The engine enables the entire network to operate at its optimum state and provides more services than the traditional distributed network, thus avoiding frequent network expansions.

The flow engine has been deployed on several service provider networks and the results from these trials show that network throughput can be boosted by 60 percent. The engine can quickly adapt to dynamic service changes and support service requirements by future SDN networks, in terms of the speed of computation and global traffic optimization.