China Unicom, Huawei deploy transport SDN in Hangzhou

China Unicom’s Zhejiang subsidiary, together with Huawei, has deployed a Transport  software-defined networking (T-SDN) project on the Hangzhou metro transport network to provide bandwidth on demand (BoD) leased lines for government and enterprises.

Unicom aims to introduce SDN technology to transport networks to proactively meet group customer service requirements and improve customer experience.

The project is part of Unicom’s Cloud-Oriented Ubiquitous-Broadband Elastic Network (CUBE-Net 2.0) strategy.

The CUBE-Net 2.0 architecture focuses on users and data and relies on ultra-broadband networks and data centers to implement cloud-and-network synergy, on-demand adjustment, and high network flexibility, thereby allowing Unicom to offer network as a service (NaaS), the operator said.

In terms of hardware, Huawei provided its MS-OTN bearer that implements unified cross-connect and grooming for multiple services to construct metro transport networks in line with a simplified network concept.

In terms of software, Huawei provided its T-SDN BoD leased line platform that uses SDN controllers to globally manage network-wide resources and offers standard northbound APIs through network orchestrators to achieve network programmability.