ZTE’s AI technology guarantees network security for China Unicom during the fight against novel coronavirus

04 March 2020, 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 has assisted the Guangdong branch of China Unicom in completing the deployment of Intelligent Configuration Check based on the AI technology of “Role Fingerprint” on its existing network to guarantee the stability and security of the novel coronavirus prevention and control network.

The Guangdong branch of China Unicom performed in-depth inspection of nearly 10,000 devices in the IPRAN networks in 10 cities, involving the data of over 15 million configuration items, check the probable problems one by one, and solve all the potential failures. It also implemented 7 24-hour monitoring of the network status. Thus its IPRAN has stood the tests of high-bandwidth applications such as remote clinic, remote office, and remote meetings, achieving zero-failure operation.

In this network security guarantee program, ZTE uses the Intelligent Configuration Check of its ZENIC ONE system to check the hardware and operation environment of online devices, versions of online devices, basic network protection and service configuration, networking, and device resource utilization. The AI technology, as an effective complement to the regular network inspection tools, widens the coverage of network fault discovery and provides double guarantee for network security.

Besides, it’s worth mentioning that it took only one person in less than 10 minutes to finish the in-depth inspection of the data in 10 cities. Compared with traditional inspection solutions, which need several O&M personnel to work for several days to deal with the data in one city, this solution drastically reduces labor cost and significantly improves network O&M efficiency.

The Role Fingerprint-based intelligent configuration check, jointly implemented by ZTE and the Guangdong branch of China Unicom, uses AI algorithm for data mining to quickly discover dependence or causality between massive data. By means of correlation analysis, it discovers weak correlation and constructs abnormal configuration models. Then, it constructs Knowledge Graph and strengthens abnormal check with AI technology to find the configuration risk.

This function involves semantic identification, data mining and big data analysis, and employs AI technologies, such as AI algorithm, NLP (Natural Language Processing), and Knowledge Graph. This function changes the traditional manual configuration and enables intelligent configuration check. The Role Fingerprint-based Intelligent Configuration Check won the “Best Network Intelligence Award” at Broadband World Forum (BBWF) 2019. ZTE’s ZENIC ONE system supporting this solution has been successfully deployed on the existing network of China Unicom Guangdong in 4Q19.