On September 24th, Huawei's Full Connect Conference 2020 entered the second day of the agenda. Today's heavyweight is the intelligent body. In the morning, Hou Jinlong, President of Huawei Cloud and Computing BG, officially released the intelligent body. This is the first time that the industry has proposed a systematic reference architecture for the intelligent upgrade of government and enterprises. Based on the agent, both customers and partners can create their own smart solutions.
This article focuses on one of the four major components of the agent-intelligent connection. If the intelligent body is compared to the human body, then intelligent connection is to prop up the torso of the intelligent body and penetrate the brain and limbs. The importance is self-evident.
Huawei Managing Director Wang Tao
So, what is smart connection and why is smart connection needed? What value can intelligent connection bring? What technical layout and reserves does Huawei have in terms of intelligent connection? With these questions in mind, after listening to the keynote speech of Huawei's Managing Director Wang Tao "Building Intelligent Connections and Building Industry Intelligence Body", it gradually became clear.
Connection evolution
Why do we need smart connection? Because the traditional connection is not working.
In the past, the connection was mainly connected with people, but the current connection is mainly connected with objects. The number of people has grown finitely. The magnitude of 7 billion has been maintained for a long time, while things have grown infinitely. IDC predicts that by 2025, 41.6 billion devices will be connected to the Internet and maintain rapid growth.
A large number means that it is difficult to connect. A company that manages 10 people and a company that manages 1,000 people are not a concept at all. This is the same reason. Therefore, today, new requirements are put forward for the connection.
any request? Let's first look at a few typical application scenarios:
To achieve "short-term forecasting" of weather within 4 hours, massive cloud image data captured by HD cameras in various urban areas needs to be transmitted to the cloud in real time for AI analysis. Due to the huge amount of computing data, multiple distributed DCs are required for coordination, and data center connections with large bandwidth, lossless and zero packet loss are particularly important.
The Shanghai Hongqiao High-speed Railway Station departs every 84 seconds, with the highest departure density in China, and extremely high requirements for the reliability of the control signal system connection.
For autonomous driving to become popular, data transmission delay must be low, data processing capabilities must be strong, and the quality of the connection between end-side clouds and between data centers is critical.
The three scenarios describe what the future connection should look like, divided into three levels: one is the internal connection of the smart hub, such as the interconnection of AI cluster servers and the interconnection between cloud data centers; the second is the connection between the smart hub and the smart interactive device Connection, the connection between the cloud side ends; the third is the connection between intelligent interactive devices, such as the interconnection between AI cameras, 4K drones, and robotic arms.
Integrating these three levels into one, in one sentence, everything is interconnected.
Today, intelligence is the goal pursued by the whole society, and the Internet of Everything is the foundation of intelligence, and the degree of importance can be imagined. Summarizing the connection requirements of the Internet of Everything, there are five aspects: high reliability, lossless and zero packet loss, differentiated services, real-time large bandwidth, and intelligent operation and maintenance.
In fact, this is what Huawei thinks the future connection should look like. Huawei calls it smart connection. Huawei believes that smart connection should have three major characteristics:
The first is ubiquitous gigabit. Bandwidth capabilities are the foundation of connectivity. AI cameras, UAVs, and industrial cameras for ultra-high definition, as well as VR and AR applications for industrial scenes, require gigabit connectivity that is ubiquitous and seamless.
The second is deterministic experience. The main object of the connection of the agent is the object, and the main scene is the production. Office scenes are similar, but production scenes vary greatly. For example, during the daily peak of Shenzhen Airport in 2019, an aircraft took off and landed in less than one minute on average . Real-time network protection is especially important; power companies need to promise five nines of reliability , The average annual household power outage does not exceed 6 minutes . In the production environment, if the connection fails to achieve certainty, the enterprise cannot achieve security and reliability.
Shenzhen Baoan Airport
The last is hyper-automation. As a result of the intelligent upgrade of the industry, the scale and complexity of the network have increased exponentially. A network report from a Huawei customer shows that after the introduction of new technologies such as 5G, the connection density will increase by 100 times and the parameter settings will increase by more than 10,000. Rely on people? It is unrealistic. Big data and AI must be introduced. The simplicity is left to humans and the complexity to intelligence. This is hyper-automation.
Ubiquitous gigabit, deterministic experience, and ultra-automation are in the same line with the five requirements of the Internet of Everything mentioned above.
Value is everything
It doesn't bring value, everything is empty talk.
Regarding the value of the connection, Metcalfe’s Law has been interpreted very early, that is, the value of the connection is proportional to the square of the number of connections. In other words, the greater the number of connections, the greater the possible value. Why do I add the word "possible" because there is another variable that should be taken into consideration, and that is the quality of the connection.
In the "Wall Street Trading's Pursuit of the Speed of Light" report, there is a set of very interesting data. The reduction of 1 millisecond connection delay can bring economic benefits of 1 million US dollars. The measured data of a large OTT cloud data center shows that 0.1% of network packet loss will bring about 50% of AI computing power loss. The quality of the connection will determine the gain or loss.
It’s no wonder that Wang Tao will tease in the evolution: If Mr. Metcalfe allows it, Huawei hopes to add several more variables to “Metcalfe’s Law”, including bandwidth, delay, and slicing, and redefine the value of connections. Huawei said It is the "New Metcalfe Law". Obviously, in the "New Metcalfe Law", the quality of the connection determines the value of the connection, and the connection force is the productivity!
Let's take a look at the changes brought about by smart connection through a few application cases.
An airport in China launched the innovation of 5G smart navigation lights, realizing real-time connection and low-latency communication to more than 20,000 navigation lights, improving the efficiency of aircraft running and skiing. In addition, the border patrol car adopts 5G+4K video backhaul to realize all-weather real-time monitoring of patrol pictures and accurate post-event review, improve the efficiency of handling abnormal events, and build a three-dimensional airport security system.
Guangdong, a government network through the introduction of IPv6 + technology, direct jump quickly get through various commissioned Bureau data centers, cross-domain cross-sectoral rapid access to the video, before changing gradually, hop by hop to get through the data center, inefficient, and difficult to coordinate the problem.
A bank used a 5G network with large bandwidth and low latency to realize the intelligent transformation of unmanned branches .
By deploying 5G and F5G networks, Suzhou Industrial Park realizes real-time, large-bandwidth connections to all monitoring drones and high-definition cameras, and gathers more than 5,000 video surveillance channels and more than 13,000 IoT sensors to build a solid foundation for a smart city.
Schematic diagram of the overall design of Suzhou Industrial Park
Not only transportation, government, finance, and industrial parks, but in many other industries, many customers have already laid the cornerstone for smart business transformation through intelligent connections.
Smart connection is the first step of smart upgrade. Without this step, there will be no success in smart upgrade.
Huawei's secret weapon
Compared to many companies, Huawei’s biggest feature is that it does not fight unprepared battles. Therefore, since the concept has been put forward, the corresponding product solutions must be prepared. Simply put, there are three key words: ubiquitous gigabit, deterministic experience, and hyper-automation. Huawei builds product solutions around them.
For example, for the technical field, based on 5G, F5G, Wi-Fi 6 to create ubiquitous gigabit connections for AI cameras, ultra-high-definition drones and other intelligent interactive devices; fully introduce AI, accurately identify business intent, and dynamically match network resources in real time. Relying on the intelligent IP+Optical collaborative connection network to meet the needs of differentiated services and deterministic experience for different businesses; fully introduce AI in network elements, networks and clouds to create autonomous driving network solutions, upgrade SDN to AND, and achieve super Automated operation and maintenance. Facing the industry, provide intelligent connection solutions for different scenarios.
Specifically, Huawei will focus on three directions, one is 5G, the other is intelligent IP network, and the third is F5G.
At the 5G level , Huawei is already a globally recognized top player, and has delivered a "three-pole" 5G network for many operators around the world, that is, the ultimate experience, minimalist networking, and extremely intelligent operation and maintenance. This is not enough. Huawei is oriented to the intelligent upgrade of the industry and continues to enhance its uplink bandwidth, delay and positioning.
At the intelligent IP network level, Huawei has fully upgraded the solution to 2.0. The core change is the addition of AI technology. For example, the CloudFabric 2.0 solution introduces a unique AI scheduling algorithm to achieve lossless data center networks with zero packet loss, and both AI computing power and storage efficiency can be increased by more than 30%.
At the F5G level, it launched a smart-simplified all-optical strategy to extend the optical connection from the data center to the edge of the network, and launched three bright solutions, including the Campus OptiX solution that brings POL technology to the campus; the Single OptiX all-optical solution based on Liquid OTN technology Optical bearer solutions, and DC OptiX data center interconnection solutions based on DC908.
Obviously, no matter where it is on the network, Huawei has a complete product solution system to help customers realize intelligent connections.
Summarize the full text.
The era of intelligence is accelerating. As a connector, intelligent connection is not only a link for enterprises to realize intelligence, but also a bridge for enterprises to the future. Although Huawei has made a lot of achievements, it will not stop. In the future, Huawei will continue to invest in basic research and systematically improve the engineering capabilities of the whole machine around platforms, modules, algorithms, and processes;
At the same time, in the fields of optical communications and cellular communications, constantly challenge the Shannon limit to achieve the best network performance;
And will actively work with various industry organizations to accelerate the promotion of key technologies such as 5G, IP and optical transmission, and the establishment or optimization of industry-oriented standards.
Just like Wang Tao said, from a higher and farther perspective, the technological exploration and industrial development of connections will never end! Huawei has not done enough.