Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

In this era, the Internet has long been like water, air and housing, becoming a resource for everyone to survive. But perhaps few people will delve into how much natural resources are consumed and how much emissions pressure will be put on our planet to bring the Internet to our computers and mobile phones.

In front of the public, the Internet always appears and is active in the image of high-tech and low-pollution. But in fact, in order to allow massive amounts of data to flow around the world every year, network equipment continues to generate huge greenhouse gas emissions, and causes a large consumption of water and electricity resources, and of course, electronic and heavy metal pollution caused by equipment construction and disposal. In 2018, Nature published an article in which, according to data estimates, Internet traffic has increased from 2TB a year to 1.1 ZB in the past 30 years, and annual traffic has increased 16666 times. The result of the global data explosion is that by 2017, the global Internet will consume 2 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity, accounting for 7% of global energy consumption, half of the annual electricity consumption in the United States, and the power generation capacity of 200 Three Gorges Dam will be required to meet it.

What is more terrible is that with the further improvement of data flood, the large-scale application of intelligent technology, and the arrival of Internet of Everything, the problem of network energy consumption will inevitably be further aggravated. In order to deal with this core problem in natural environment protection, the communication industry is also actively exploring various feasible green environmental protection and low power consumption solutions.

Among them, one of the most effective innovation directions is to implement "light advance and copper retreat" in the field of network data transmission, which is the basic consensus of the global network industry. Replacing heavy copper cables with crystal clear optical fibers can bring lower power consumption, lower pollution, and less construction damage. It can be said that this fine glass fiber made of sand and rare earths is inherently environmentally friendly. So, what kind of value can all-optical network technology bring to environmental protection? Is it convincing enough to balance the needs of industrial development with environmentally friendly characteristics?

Together, we can explore the future value of optical networks for green energy from the case of Huawei Optical Cross (OXC) technology helping China Telecom Sichuan to save energy and reduce emissions. It is understood that Sichuan Telecom has only introduced Huawei OXC equipment on its 12 core nodes, and has received energy compensation equivalent to 2000 trees per year in the land of abundance.

Taking this case as a starting point, we will find that the dream of protecting our green planet under the premise of rapid technological development is not far away.

2000 trees/year: Light Cube's gift to the Land of Abundance

We know that China is currently the country with the highest penetration rate, household rate and application rate of optical fiber in the world. "Light advance and copper retreat" not only brings great improvement of fixed network carrying capacity and overall leap of network quality to Chinese operators, but also makes great achievements in the field of energy conservation and emission reduction, making the telecommunications industry a pioneer in building an environment-friendly society in China.

Among them, Sichuan Telecom started an all-round promotion very early in the field of "light advance and copper retreat," which not only supported Sichuan's development process of becoming the bottom of the Internet industry, but also brought significant energy consumption reduction and environmental friendliness to the beautiful land of abundance. As early as 2012, Sichuan Telecom started the construction of all-optical network, replacing copper wire with optical fiber. As a green medium, optical fiber itself can save 60%-75% energy consumption compared with copper cable, which brings important improvement to Sichuan Telecom's energy conservation and emission reduction work.

In February of this year, in order to further build an all-optical city and bring a greener and more environmentally friendly communication system, Sichuan Telecom joined hands with Huawei to build an "optical cube" network based on the all-optical crossover equipment OXC on the basis of the province's green optical fiber network. The so-called "optical cube" refers to the superposition of advanced all-optical network technology solutions on the basis of the layout of all-optical network to achieve better industrial energy efficiency and low energy consumption goals.

Huawei OXC optical switching equipment completed the "optical cube" task this time.

This very sophisticated optical fiber equipment can integrate the functions of multiple heavy network equipment in the past into one sophisticated equipment, reducing the space occupation by 90%, and also supporting Sichuan Telecom to build a provincial three-dimensional all-optical backbone network to further achieve the goal of energy conservation and emission reduction. At present, Sichuan Telecom has introduced Huawei OXC equipment into 12 core nodes such as Chengdu Xinhua, Chengdu Bessen and Mianyang Network Management Building in the provincial trunk system, and optical cables are interconnected among the newly added equipment to form a mesh network structure; at the same time, the circuits carried on the original system are cut to the newly built OXC system to form an "optical cube" network with 12 OXC nodes as the core.

And the results of this action are obvious: the current LightCube network saves 250,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, equivalent to planting 2000 trees a year. In the future, with the comprehensive construction of Sichuan's all-light city, 8 million kWh of electricity will be saved every year, equivalent to 64000 trees per year.

Behind such a huge energy saving and emission reduction capability, Huawei's black technology in the field of all-optical network has brought about key changes.

1000 optical fibers/1 "A4 paper": Huawei's all-optical OXC black technology revolution

The reason why the "cube" effect of the all-optical network can be achieved on the basis of the substantial energy-saving and environmental protection effect of the optical network mainly comes from the comprehensive optimization of the current optical network equipment and solutions by Huawei's all-optical network technology system. One of the technologies that came out of the C position was Huawei's all-optical backplane technology, which was widely reported by media and triggered widespread discussion on social media.

In the all-optical backplane technology, Huawei has made more than 1000 optical fibers into an optical backplane with only the size of "A4 paper" through innovative optical fiber printing technology, completing the geometric reduction of equipment volume under the same transmission capacity. The optical network equipment developed based on this technology-Huawei's all-optical crossover equipment OXC can replace nine 2.2-meter-long wardrobe-sized devices with one refrigerator-sized device, which can not only simplify operation and maintenance for operators, but also reduce the room area by more than 75% and reduce power consumption by more than 50%.

With the support of all-optical backplane technology, Huawei all-optical cross OXC equipment can bring huge volume reduction and energy consumption reduction to operators 'optical switching. In general, the backbone network optical switching of traditional operators is often realized by a row of tall optical switching equipment, and each equipment is connected by dense optical fibers. In the case of Sichuan Telecom, the optical switching node with huge size and complex operation and maintenance management was replaced by Huawei all-optical cross OXC equipment, triggering a comprehensive transformation of the operator's optical network from room area, energy use to operation and maintenance management scheme.

The OptiXtrans series OSN 9800 P32/P32C, the world's only commercial-grade all-optical crossover OXC optical transmission product released by Huawei, is supporting global operators to move towards the all-optical network 2.0 era. The product has three innovative breakthroughs:

1, the industry's largest capacity, through the introduction of liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) technology, so that the optical switching capacity to reach Pbit/s level, support single frame capacity of 1.5Pbit/s, 32-dimensional ultra-high-dimensional scheduling capabilities, while equipment integration is 9 times the traditional ROADM scheme.

2, 0 fiber connection, based on the industry's unique optical backplane technology, can support the service opening time from 30 minutes to 3 minutes, to achieve full automation of fiber scheduling.

3. Digital optical layer, using self-developed optical label technology, supports wavelength-level network status monitoring and end-to-end visibility of more than 50 optical parameters. Optical network troubleshooting time ranges from hour to minute, realizing comprehensive automation of optical layer operation and maintenance.

The comprehensive transformation of infrastructure directly brings about the substantial advancement of green environmental protection in the era of all-optical network. From this case jointly created by Sichuan Telecom and Huawei, we can see the high future plasticity of all-optical network in green sustainable development. An era of dramatically lower energy consumption and carbon emissions is no longer a dream.

1 Future: From All-Light to Green Planet

Some people may think that the energy-saving and emission-reducing effects of planting 2000 trees a year are not enough to make us overly optimistic about the green development of the communications industry. However, it should be noted that Sichuan Telecom's case is only a microcosm of the energy-saving and emission-reduction effects of the all-optical network 2.0 era, and it is also a beginning of the trend of light advancing and copper retreating.

If we think about the replication effect and scale effect that Huawei all-optical cross OXC can achieve in the global operator market and communication industry chain, we should be optimistic enough about the future in which all-optical network 2.0 will bring about a significant reduction in energy consumption and pollution in the entire communication industry.

From the bottom of the technology implementation mode, light into copper retreat itself is a profound environmental change. The main raw material of optical fiber is glass, which is made of sand. Upgrading copper wire to green optical fiber as information transmission medium can further reduce environmental pollution and resource waste on the premise of increasing information transmission efficiency and promote harmonious coexistence between science and technology and nature. On this basis, the comprehensive iteration of all-optical network products can bring about a further decline in the energy consumption, carbon emissions, pollution and other fields of the all-optical network system, and realize a sustainable and highly intensive development from energy to equipment system to industrial development. Taking Sichuan Telecom as an example, 250,000 kWh of electricity can be saved every year by adopting Huawei all-optical cross OXC equipment. When this technology is fully rolled out around the world, when Huawei's green and environmentally friendly all-optical network technologies in various fields form industry intersection and value synergy with Huawei's other environmentally friendly ICT technologies, we may be able to return the beautiful environment to the earth in the development process of a highly digitized world.

Huawei's all-optical network technology and solutions are triggering the friendly development and sustainable development cycle of the communications industry, thus fully solving the problem of communication energy consumption explosion in the industry prediction. What is more valuable is that Huawei's green technology achievements, such as all-optical cross-OXC equipment, can bring operators great network enhancement capability while taking into account commercial values such as cost reduction and energy consumption reduction. Therefore, the network quality and industry competitiveness of operators can be improved, and the industrial system can fully support the green environmental protection value brought by all-optical network 2.0 under the positive development and interest recognition.

Tao Jingwen, director of Huawei and director of the Sustainable Development Committee, believes: "Technology is not an opponent of nature, but a part of symbiosis with nature. ICT technology can not only promote global economic prosperity, but also make our environment better. It is our belief that technology and nature coexist, and it is our commitment to live up to it in the past, present and future. "

Looking into the future from the all-optical network, we will find that the common future of mankind will be an intelligent world with Internet of Everything and a green planet with low energy consumption, low emission and sustainable development.

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