Huawei today released site, network and operations solutions aimed at increasing energy efficiency and reducing carbon emissions across the network. The new announcements included three network system solutions, as well as a green-focussed energy indicator system for network operations.

Huawei’s Dr Philip Song, Chief Marketing Officer of Huawei Carrier Business Group, officially launches Huawei’s new 1+3 green network solutions.

Dr Philip Song, Chief Marketing Office, Huawei Carrier Business Group, said that the new solutions are needed to help operators serve the annual 54% growth of data traffic whilst meeting commitments to cut carbon emissions by 45%.

“Today I would like to officially anounced Huawei’s new green solutions, including three architecture and one energy indicator solution, our 1+3 systematic green development solutions”

Huawei has targeted three areas for green-focussed innovation – green sites, green transmission networks, and green O&M policies. 

For the first area, new base station site solutions, Song announced a new fully outdoor, integrated solution. This solution replaces equipment rooms with outdoor cabinets, removing air conditioners and other auxiliary sources of power demand where possible. The green site solution also replaces existing outdoor cabinets with blade power supply units that can be pole-mounted. “This makes natural heat dissipation possible. And as power units are getting closer to RF units, there will be less cable losses,” Song added.

Song outlined how new integrated, outdoor site solutions can reduce energy consumption, and reduce energy loss.

Each blade has output power, Huawei says, to support one frequency band, one RAT, and one site, so each blade unit can simultaneously support 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G.

“It does this by making use of ultra-low magnetic loss material that reduces the eddy current loss,” Song said.

A further innovation at the green site is a new design for the radio antenna that eliminates the need for cables by integrating multiple wideband antenna modules at a site, hereby eliminating cable loss. 

Huawei also announced a flexible solar power panel that can be mounted simply on rooftops, and comes with an intelligent storage capability to store excess power generated on sunny days. That reduces site dependence on mains grid power. 

Song said that at a site in Guiyang, Guizhou, after cabinets were replaced with blade power supply units on the pole, SEE (Site Energy Efficiency) grew, which reduced annual carbon emissions by 4.3 tons per site, per year. At Jinhua, Zhejiang, Huawei’s blade power supply units removed air conditioning by moving all auxiliary facilities like power supply units and batteries outdoors, making natural heat dissipation possible. This lead to an 18% increase in SEE, he claimed.

Song also announced solutions for the transmission network. He said that operators should be moving to all-optical, simplified and intelligent technologies to reduce cross-site emissions, taking advantage of a simplified networking architecture to improve forwarding efficiency. 

In optical transport networks, Song said that Huawei has has added two new materials into mainstream fibre, to extend the C band to 120 wavelengths, 25% more than the industry average. Song said with Huawei’s Super C+L bands, the bandwidth per fiber has increased to 100 Tbps. In the router Huawei has merged multiple cabinets into one rack, and has also introduced introduced dynamic hibernation to its routers, so that they automatically adjust the NP forwarding frequency based on tidal traffic patterns.

“ To sum up, we believe that a green network must be all-optical, simplified, and intelligent,” Song said. 

The third part of Song’s launch touched on changes to network operations. 

“We need to design Operation & Maintenance policies for optimising energy efficiency,” Song said. He said that network operations and maintenance (OAM) can be leveraged to develop network policies that are dedicated to energy savings. These can include measures such as energy efficiency indicators that can be used to set policies and provide visibility into the energy efficiency of the network.

Song said examples of green operations included maximising user migration to more energy-efficient radio access technologies, and using network analytics to select optimum routes and forwarding path utilisation.

Stepping into the NOC, presenting new energy indicator and green-focussed O&M.

Huawei is also introducing energy efficiency indicators within its management software. Huawei’s energy management platform, NetEco, can visualize energy consumption and energy efficiency of every site, enabling an operator to create optimisation policies, such as selecting the top 100 low-efficiency sites for further optimisation.

Its energy focused operations also supports real-time and historical energy consumption visibility. 

Song said, “With intelligent hibernation technology, NCE automatically detects idle resources and shuts them down to reduce power consumption. In the future, we will support dynamic frequency modulation and other mind-blowing technologies to further reduce consumption, helping operators achieve low-carbon targets. Currently, we are working with Beijing Unicom to further innovate intelligent hibernation.”

Song said Huawei is going to extend energy efficiency in each of the three areas. 

At the site it will integrate radio units to support more wideband antennas, from 8T to 32T to 64T.  Huawei will also work on developing new high gain, low loss materials, such as those in the blade site and that it has added to fibre.  And it wants to extend all-optical cross connect in more scenarios, from backbone to access, as well as increasing the bandwidth and range of optical transmission to deploy networks with fewer layers.

Finally, within operations, Song said Huawei would execute faster on introducing its energy-saving policy controls.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Mobile network security researcher issues cloud warning https://t.co/4DXETVpE2u Poorly configured Containers and ac… https://t.co/SbyidKoEmL

Karl gets it. You can too. https://t.co/13qdtKKiTh https://t.co/xjSsacRA0l

"Huawei urges carriers to harness strategic benefits of telco cloud" https://t.co/ac5S2VVfmq Use cloud to do better… https://t.co/Javkar8Biv

Subscribe now to TMN Quarterly magazine, and get additional access to a host of extra, members-only content.