At Huawei Win-Win Innovation Week, executives Ryan Ding, President of Huawei’s Carrier Business Group, and Dr. Philip Song, Huawei’s Carrier BG Chief Marketing Officer, discussed the role of sustainable ICT infrastructure in helping operators systematically build green network to simultaneously address traffic growth and support carbon emission reduction. This took place during the Green Development Solutions Launch, held on the second day of the event, followed by the launch of a new solution suite.
Green ICT for New Value
During his keynote speech titled “Green ICT for New Value”, Ryan Ding stressed the need for operators to prioritize energy efficiency and called for the establishment of a standard, industry-wide indicator system for energy efficiency. He explained, “Every major advancement in history has been accompanied by a significant improvement in the energy efficiency of information transmission. The increase in carbon emissions generated by exploding data traffic will become a global problem that must be tackled in the next five to ten years. Increasing energy efficiency will be the way forward.”
According to third-party research, data traffic generated by digital services is expected to grow by 13-fold over 2020 by 2030. This means that, if energy efficiency improvements are not made, the ICT industry’s energy consumption and carbon emissions will see a 2.3-fold increase. According to ITU, the ICT industry will need to reduce its carbon emissions by at least 45% by 2030 to meet the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Paris Agreement’s goal.
Ding said, “We are now facing an unprecedented challenge: As more and more industries are going digital, the demand for data will rise sharply, which will result in a surge in energy consumption. In the meantime, the whole world is working to combat climate change, and the ICT industry must urgently achieve carbon peak and carbon neutrality.”
Improvements to energy efficiency will benefit operators in three ways. First, user migration, site upgrades, and network power reduction will bring them OPEX savings. Second, improved energy efficiency will support the migration of 2G and 3G users to 4G and 5G services. Third, operators’ efforts to reduce carbon footprint will positively impact the environment, helping them better fulfill their social responsibilities.
To help operators achieve these goals, Huawei has proposed a three-layer solution: green sites, green networks, and green operations. First, Huawei developed solutions to improve site energy efficiency by adopting a highly integrated design, using new materials, and moving main equipment and power supply units outdoors. Second, the company’s simplified network architecture makes forwarding faster and supports the construction of simplified, all-optical, and intelligent networks. Finally, at the operations level, Huawei offers a solution that generates and distributes optimization policies while making energy efficiency more visualized and manageable.
So far, these green development solutions have been deployed for operators in more than 100 countries. In Germany, for example, Huawei’s Power Star solution has helped realize minute-level energy efficiency self-optimization, improving energy efficiency greatly. In Spain, Huawei’s optical cross-connect (OXC) solution has been deployed on a customer’s backbone network, increasing energy efficiency by 81% and reducing costs by 29%. In Turkey, Huawei has deployed its green site solution for a customer, where equipment rooms are replaced with cabinets, eliminating the need for equipment rooms and air conditioners. The solution is expected to save 19,000 kWh of electricity per site per year.
Huawei and its operator partners are already working together to increase their “carbon handprint” by empowering carbon-intensive industries to boost energy efficiency using ICT solutions. The emissions reduction they enable can be 10 times their own emissions. Many success stories have already been seen in key carbon-intensive industries like ports, coal mining, and steel.
At the end of his speech, Ding called on the establishment of a unified, industry-wide indicator system as this would help establish baselines against which energy efficiency can be measured and serve as a guide for the green development of the ICT industry as a whole. Ding closed out his speech saying, “Huawei is ready to work with operators and create new value with green ICT.”
Launching Green Infrastructure Solutions
Dr. Philip Song announced the launch of a new suite of green development solution, and delivered a speech titled “Developing Green ICT Infrastructure with Optimal Energy Efficiency”. He explained how the solution is aimed at helping operators systematically improve network energy efficiency: “As ICT infrastructure continues to evolve from 5G and F5G to 5.5G and F5.5G, green networks, evaluated against the network carbon intensity (NCIe) index, will become a critical part of future target networks. The main objective of our solution launch today is to help operators systematically build green networks that simultaneously address traffic growth and carbon emission reduction.”
According to Song, technological innovation is required at three levels to help customers achieve green development goals:
- At the site and equipment level, more integrated designs and new materials should be used to move sites fully outdoors, and increase equipment energy efficiency and the efficiency of using renewable energy.
- In cross-site coordination and networking, a simplified network architecture and improved forwarding efficiency are required to maximize energy efficiency and make networks all-optical, simplified, and intelligent.
- To achieve green O&M, new O&M and energy-saving policies should be more easily developed and delivered, and energy efficiency indicators and baselines should be made more visible, manageable, and optimizable.
At the event, Song launched Huawei’s green development solution with innovations at these three levels, as well as the new NCIe indicator system which supports this three-layer solution of green sites, green networks, and green operations. The NCIe energy efficiency indicator system proposed by Huawei has been approved by ITU-T SG5 and is now in the process of public consultation.
Closing out his speech, Song also announced the opening of the Evergreen Land engagement room, where Huawei will meet with global operators to discuss in-depth about green development and ways to build the most energy-efficient ICT infrastructure. He reiterated, “Huawei is committed to working with operators to improve the energy efficiency of ICT infrastructure and create value using green ICT technologies.”
The full details of Huawei’s new green development solution have been provided below:
At the site layer, the solution focuses on innovation in three areas:
- Fully-outdoor deployment: Using innovative materials, the 12 kW blade power module features the highest capacity in the industry and supports 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G within a single site. The leading One Blade One Site solution features 97% site energy efficiency (SEE), also the highest in the industry.
- High degrees of integration: Ultra-wideband RF modules and multi-band antennas are integrated within these simplified sites. The company’s unique signal direct injection feeding (SDIF) technology is able to realize zero losses with zero cabling inside multi-band antennas, boosting the telecommunications energy efficiency (TEE) of the equipment.
- Efficient use of renewable energy: Solutions such as Huawei’s AI-based PV-storage optimization and iPV shading for loss reduction are used to maximize the efficiency of using renewable energy, generating about 25% more electricity than traditional solutions.
At the network layer, the solution also features innovations in three areas:
- All-optical connectivity: By upgrading the entire network from electrical switching to optical switching, the solution improves energy efficiency by about 10 times, while swapping copper for fiber further improves energy efficiency by about five times.
- Simplification: The multi-service processing capability of Huawei routers enables the solution to integrate four units of equipment into one. With SDH modernization, the solution replaces multiple cabinets per site with one sub-rack per site, significantly reducing the amount of equipment room space needed and improving network energy efficiency (NEE). Continuous innovation in the optical transmission network (OTN) has also enabled the ultra-wideband Super C120+L120 solution to support a per-fiber capacity of nearly 100 Tbit/s, which means 1 million users can simultaneously watch movies online over a single fiber the thickness of a hair.
- Intelligence: The solution supports intelligent dynamic hibernation of routers and automatically adjusts the forwarding frequency of network processors based on changes in the traffic volume.
At the operation layer, the solution focuses on user operations, energy saving policies, and energy efficiency indicators:
- The solution accelerates the migration of users to networks using more energy-efficient RATs, for example, from 2G and 3G to 4G and 5G, greatly reducing energy consumption per bit and reducing the NCIe value.
- The solution implements real-time traffic control and analysis, and adjusts forwarding processors’ frequency or shuts down ports based on traffic volume changes.
- The solution ensures that the indicators are visible, manageable, and optimizable.
The Win-Win Huawei Innovation Week is held from July 18 to July 21 in Shenzhen, China. Together with global operators, industry professionals, and opinion leaders, we dive into topics such as 5.5G, green development, and digital transformation to envision shared success in the digital economy. For more information, please visit: https://carrier.huawei.com/en/events/winwin-innovation-week.
