During MWC 2024, Shen Chengying, President of Telco Cloud &5G Core, Huawei Cloud Core Network Product Line, delivered a speech at the Cloud and Intelligent Edge session hosted by GSMA. In the speech, Shen elaborated on the ideas and practices of Huawei's 5GtoB solutions, and how they can accelerate industrial network upgrades and underpin digital transformation of the manufacturing industry. This highlights Huawei's deep insight into the future digital era and its active role in driving industry transformation.
Shen stated that the high density of 5GtoB connections and strong computing capabilities in the past six years of 5G have been powerful driving forces in the development of the digital economy. Shen stressed that the investments of operator precursors in 5GtoB had created a positive business cycle, and propelled the rapid development of DICT digital transformation by 5 to 6 times. Shen concluded that high reliability, data isolation, and fast adaptation to industrial-specific protocols are the core requirements for in-depth convergence of OT and ICT.
Shen also expressed that Huawei had proposed the idea of "one network for multiple purposes" to bolster 5G-powered industrial manufacturing. Specifically, 5G collaborates with MEC to deliver one converged network for multiple purposes, including auxiliary production, workshop production, and field production.
For an auxiliary production network, Huawei proposes a highly reliable dual-system hot backup redundancy solution to ensure the industrial-level reliability in certain auxiliary production scenarios, such as AGV-assisted remote control and5G-assisted video backhaul. This solution cuts the service switchover time to 3 seconds or less, which is much faster than the switchover time (more than 15 seconds) in the industry's conventional solution.
For a workshop production network, Huawei provides industrial-grade 5G LAN and indoor high-precision positioning technologies to help quickly adjust production lines for flexible manufacturing, so that various industrial devices can all be connected quickly and automatically. Huawei also offers an overall solution to satisfy enterprises' demands for intelligent production such as smart quality inspection and predictive maintenance as well as to improve production efficiency. This solution consists of a computing platform and standard industry applications for enterprises to use as needed. The platform provides diversified computing capabilities and allows the access of various types of industrial terminals.
For a field production network, Huawei develops the industrial UPF solution. This solution ensures an end-to-end latency of no more than 4 ms and realizes five-nines availability. It adopts fast adaptation to industrial-specific protocols and ultra-high reliability technologies such as dual fed and selective receiving. This effectively addresses the requirement of industrial-grade deterministic data transmission, making 5G mandatory in the core production processes and drastically improving production efficiency.
Shen stressed that industrial digital transformation will bring forth a large number of opportunities and challenges, and Huawei has developed the 5G+MEC+OT-UPF solution to offer a converged network for auxiliary production, workshop production, and field production, ensuring high reliability and diversified computing capabilities. On a final note, Shen said that "Huawei calls upon all industries to work together to build advanced 5G/5.5G industrial manufacturing private networks and empower industrial digital transformation".