Huawei said that networks were constantly scaling up, and service types transmitted over networks were becoming increasingly diversified. As a result, when service experience is degraded, Information Technology personnel cannot judge whether the fault is caused by the system itself or by the network.
According to Huawei, there were factors affecting user service experience.
It said in addition to common factors such as network outage and insufficient bandwidth, “many other factors also affect user service experience, for example, aging of network devices, network configuration errors, and invalid flow control.”
It, however, said that the factors were often overlooked due to a lack of effective network quality detection methods.
On difficult service quality detection and network fault location, Huawei said that driven by the rapid development of the Internet, the Internet Provider network had become a cornerstone for information transmission.
“The IP network is connectionless-oriented and uses ‘best-effort service forwarding mode, leading to large-scale network deployment and providing infrastructure support for abundant Internet services,” Adplex reported for Huawei.
“Since the IP network is connectionless, the only service connection information on the network is in the data packets. This characteristic leads to large-scale deployment of the IP network as well as difficult quality monitoring. When video pixelation occurs during a video conference, the network itself cannot be quickly aware of service quality degradation,” Adplex reported.
However, Huawei’ said that agile network provided an excellent network experience to allow the connectionless IP network to be aware of faults and quickly report them to IT Operations and Maintenance personnel.
“Huawei can add a proactive quality awareness mechanism to the IP network. This quality awareness mechanism is similar to self-awareness and feedback systems in a human body,” it said in a statement.
The Public Relations Manager, Huawei Technology Nigeria Limited, Kevin Li Chenyu, said Huawei’s “unique” Packet Conservation Algorithm for Internet technology can solve the problem of difficult network quality detection and fault location.
He said, “By leveraging this technology, Huawei’s Agile Network Solution adds a proactive quality awareness mechanism to the IP network, maintaining the connectionless feature and implementing proactive network quality awareness. iPCA technology fully enhances network quality detection and accurate fault location capabilities, reducing network O&M costs.
“By leveraging the centralised control idea of Software-Defined Networking, this technology calculates the difference between the number of input packets and that of output packets through multiple ports on network border devices to detect packet loss on the network.”
Li Chenyu added, “iPCA performs service quality detection and communication based on IP packets, and no connection is established among detection points, allowing large-scale network deployment. iPCA performs clock synchronisation on all devices to be detected using an external clock synchronisation method and periodically colours service packets using reserved bits in an IP packet header (that is, remarking the service packets).
“iPCA then calculates the number of received packets at the egress based on the marked bits. In this way, iPCA can detect network quality using real-world service flows without interrupting services.”
He said compared to traditional network quality detection technologies, Huawei’s iPCA technology features the following advantages, IT O and M personnel could learn the overall network quality through a Network Management System using iPCA-enabled network devices, accurate network fault demarcation, and accurate network fault location.
According to him, Huawei’s iPCA technology also creates two innovations like MIMO network quality detection and easy deployment on large-scale IP networks, and real-time, accurate quality detection based on real-world service flows.
“iPCA does not need to insert detection packets. It causes zero traffic cost and does not affect user services while providing real-time, accurate quality detection results.
“Additionally, since a majority of IP communication-based services has standard IP packets, iPCA technology does not rely on any service type. It can detect nearly all types of services,” he said.
Li Chenyu also said that Huawei’s leading iPCA technology could “greatly reduce hard, tedious troubleshooting tasks, saying that the IT O&M personnel would no longer need to detect massive devices one by one or race against time to locate network faults.
“Taking advantage of its leading patented technologies, Huawei has addressed the problem of difficult IP network quality detection, helping IT O&M personnel to be aware of full-scale service quality.”
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