ZTE showcases how E-OTN facilitates ultrafast 5G transport networks at NGON

20 June 2017, Shenzhen, China – ZTE Corporation (0763.HK / 000063.SZ), a major international provider of telecommunications, enterprise and consumer technology solutions for the Mobile Internet, today announced that it showcased its E-OTN solution at NGON and Optical DCI held in Nice, France. ZTE also released its 5G oriented OTN transport solution, which is an important part of the E-OTN solution. The solution achieves continuous technical optimisation and innovation and facilitates ultrafast 5G service deployment.

Compared with other technologies, OTN naturally has high bandwidth and low latency characteristics. However, ultra-reliable and low latency communication (uRLLC) services require an end-to-end latency shorter than 1ms, and the latency assigned to bearer networks should be even shorter. This means existing bearer network equipment and networking modes must be optimised. ZTE has implemented innovation and optimisation in the internal mapping and multiplexing, forwarding, algorithms, interfaces and other aspects of OTN equipment, and can reduce the latency of equipment to the level of microseconds.

By introducing packet enhanced OTN technology in 5G fronthaul networks, not only can the latency between RAN components be reduced through direct connection by wavelength, but also the convergence and flexible forwarding of services can be achieved, meeting the needs of RAN virtualization and cloudization. For fronthaul networks, ZTE actively works with operators to promote the new lightweight OTN standard and optimise the frame structure to reduce equipment costs, reduce latency and achieve flexible bandwidth configuration. In 5G era, backhaul networks will also be the datacenter (DC) interconnection networks that carry various services, all levels of DCs can be interconnected at high rates and high capacity through OTN. Optical networks build bandwidth resource pools, and configure and adjust bandwidth according to the required traffic between DCs. Based on the optical-electrical hybrid scheduling of OTN node equipment, backhaul networks are transformed into flattened mesh networks to achieve multipath access, and reduce the numbers of network layers and equipment hops.

In addition, 5G network slicing technology can flexibly allocate different network resources for different types of service and dynamically optimise network connections. On the transmission plane, ZTE's E-OTN solution can implement slicing not only in hard pipes such as wavelengths, optical channel data units (ODUs) and virtual containers (VCs) but also in packet soft pipes. The OTN based on the software defined network (SDN) can configure and adjust bandwidth-on-demand, use optical virtual private network (OVPN) and other applications, and support multi-layer and multi-domain interoperation to reduce network construction and operating costs. These are all preparations for future integration in 5G network architecture, the support for end-to-end 5G network slicing and intelligent operation.

ZTE's E-OTN series products involve three core concepts: end-to-end, elastic, and enhanced. These help operators build open and coordinated OTNs with high bandwidth, short latency, flexible slicing and high reliability, and pave the way for the construction of 5G networks. The combination of optical and wireless will create a ultrafast 5G network and provide extreme user experience.