Adopting the new IP+Optical architecture, this solution provides unified transport of 5G fronthaul and backhaul services in a single device, along with high bandwidth, ultra-low latency, and traffic engineering based on software-defined networking (SDN). ZTE's 5G Flexhaul solution is estimated to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) by 30 percent compared to traditional solutions.
It is widely known that 5G networks provide an unparalleled user experience in terms of bandwidth, latency, and number of connections. Compared to the single scenario of 4G, 5G supports diverse scenarios, including enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), massive machine-type communications (mMTC), and ultra-reliable low-latency communications (uRLLC), and the key performance indicators (KPIs) of these different scenarios vary significantly. Furthermore, traditional networks face requirements that include infrastructure reconfiguration, equipment upgrades, and performance enhancements. Building an efficient and cost-effective carrier network to meet the requirements of very high bandwidth, ultra-low latency, and the cloudification of core networks and radio access networks (RANs) in the 5G era has become a major challenge for global operators.
ZTE's 5G Flexhaul solution combines Flex Ethernet and IP+Optical architecture, providing flexible, super-long pipeline transport capacity for 5G fronthaul and backhaul services. The 5G Flexhaul solution implements a complete end-to-end (E2E) IP+Optical synergy application and offers unified planning, scheduling, management, and maintenance for SDN controllers. Integrated IP+Optical devices are used at the massive access layer to reduce network construction costs and save equipment room space. It implements super-high-bandwidth transport via waveform connection between adjacent nodes. Furthermore, with the FlexE feature, subchannels for different services can be flexibly isolated to provide optimal flat forwarding that supports a portion of the 5G carrier network. The ZXCTN 6180H, a pre-commercial 5G transport device also being showcased at the Congress, is only 3RU high and supports up to 1T of network capacity for an access ring.
In addition to its very large pipeline transport capacity, the 5G Flexhaul solution offers flexible transport latency capabilities. The latency budget allocated to the fronthaul network by the 5G Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) is less than 100 µs. In the forwarding plane, the 5G Flexhaul solution supports both fast forwarding and ordinary forwarding modes, which can be selected according to the service type. Fast forwarding mode is used for urgent services. Time-sensitive network (TSN) technology is used to reduce the connection latency between the upstream and downstream service nodes from 30 microseconds to several microseconds. The intermediate node uses optical bypass technology to achieve a forwarding latency of less than 1 microsecond. This effectively meets the low-latency requirements of 5G and provides a strong guarantee for new services and network architectures.
The cloud-based capabilities of 5G will bring flexible and ubiquitous connections. The 5G Flexhaul solution, based on SDN-based traffic engineering, can efficiently build connections everywhere and dynamically optimize network traffic based on traffic monitoring data to match network tidal patterns and substantially increase resource utilization.

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