Cloud & Network Synergy

With the arrival of cloud era of telecom network, the NFV technology evolves continuously, and the decoupling level of NFV system is higher and higher. From the aspect of architecture, 5G network construction is a huge ICT system integration project which faces many challenges. As a result of multi-vendor integration, the assurance of E2E services is very complex, fault analysis and delimitation & location are difficult, and then the safety of the entire system decreases. There are many standard organizations and open source projects, but the ecosystem is not optimum, the integration is more and more difficult, and the integration delivery slows down gradually. 

To deal with the difficulties of 5G core network construction, ZTE provides 5GC automatic integration solution which solidifies and integrates the procedure through AIC (Auto Integration Center). It provides customized integration design in real time as required by the customer and verifies the design feasibility. After the verification, it generates detailed design documentation for 5GC network integration automatically, which is imported into the integration deployment tool on site for E2E silent integration deployment and automatic verification through the procedure. In this way, it realizes "zero intervention" in the integration deployment on 5GC site and shortens 5GC deployment/verification time greatly. In the integration procedure life-cycle, from integration planning & design, network deployment to integration test, it realizes "zero distance" between the integration design and the customers' requirements, effectively solving the pain points of operators in 5G network integration. In addition, ZTE 5GC automatic integration solution introduces cloud experience model by taking the support of offline design and remote deployment into consideration, enabling users to directly execute 5GC network integration planning and pre-integration verification in real time on the cloud, and making the selection and deployment from application scenarios to NEs more convenient and flexible. 

Highlights

ZTE 5GC automatic integration solution provides one-stop E2E tool support, covering automatic planning & design, plan verification, network deployment and integration test, for the operators through AIC. It realizes one-time input, automatically outputs the results of each integration part, supports E2E CI/CD and provides customized northbound & southbound interfaces which interact with peripheral 5G entities and automatic output of the results of each integration part. The pre-integration work flow covers various 5GC NFV integration full-service scenarios, such as NFVI integration, MANO integration and VNF integration, which make the integration of network construction much easier, increase the efficiency and quality of 5G core network integration tremendously, realize innovation of the integration mode and automatic E2E procedure of 5G system integration, and thus the solution helps the operators solve the problems of 5G construction and reduce the costs.

ZTE 5GC automatic integration solution realizes automatic E2E procedure of 5G system integration through a series of automatic integration tools; with the application verification of 5G experiment sites and commercial network of multiple countries, the solution becomes an important measure assisting network transformation; it is applicable for multiple service scenarios such as lab pre-integration, project construction and network O&M, so it decreases integration difficulty greatly, reduces input of human resources, improves entire integration efficiency and shortens 5G construction time effectively. The overall implementation effect of the successfully delivered project shows that 5GC automatic integration solution improves the project efficiency remarkably, see below:

• The automatic planning & design efficiency is improved by 75%, the configuration error rate is zero. Through simplified design input and visible automatic planning & design procedure, the planning & design becomes more convenient, and it reduces the demand on skills and difficulty on design technique. The system generates the instantiation parameter files of all the network components, so the configuration steps are more standard and the parameters are more reasonable, and it shortens the design time.
• The automatic checking and deployment & implementation improves the efficiency by more than 85% and improves the deployment efficiency. The system uses direct deployment preview to decrease manual input of parameters, and realizes zero intervention during deployment to improve the deployment efficiency. The system can monitor automatic deployment procedure of the E2E NEs in real time, the staffs can check the deployment progress any time and handle abnormal situations to guarantee successful implementation of the entire deployment procedure.
• The solution realizes one-key acceptance of the automatic test to improve the average efficiency by more than 65%. The test acceptance can perform fast scanning of the server parameter configuration with automatic tools for overall checking to find wrong parameters of current environment accurately. If there are wrong parameters, the engineers re-confirm and modify the configuration parameters quickly. During the latter test, the solution guarantees successful one-time acceptance, which shortens the test acceptance time greatly.