ZTE helps China Unicom verify 5G network

slicing application and achieve automatic

deployment of 5G FlexE slicing

PARTNER FEATURE: Recently, ZTE and China Unicom have successfully deployed the
commercially oriented end-to-end 5G network slicing applications in Shenzhen, taking a
solid step forward in exploring 5G 2B business models, and accelerating the deployment
of 5G applications.

In the 5G era, everything is connected, so that network services vary widely. Network
slicing has become one of the keys to provide secure connections and intelligent
operations for the differentiated service demands. It is also considered as an important
enabler of commercial success of 5G networks.

As early as January 2019, China Unicom released the White Paper on 5G Network Slicing,
which regards network slicing and edge computing as key technologies for opening up
network capabilities. In the past year, China Unicom has cooperated with equipment
vendors, Internet companies and industrial enterprises on slicing technologies by
conducting a amount of research and practice in technical solutions and business models.

This 5G network slicing application deployed on the physical equipment on the existing
network of the Shenzhen branch of China Unicom builds an end-to-end 5G slicing
commercial network covering wireless, transport and core networks. In this project, ZTE
and China Unicom Shenzhen have designed a variety of slicing activation modes based
on commercial scenarios for different Internet services. ZTE provided 5G transport
devices based on the hard slicing FlexE and the soft slicing SR+EVPN, which together
with the management and control integration system (ZENIC ONE), allow one-button
automatic deployment of transport slices in minutes. Meanwhile, with visualized resource
orchestration, management capabilities of sub-slicings can be invoked to achieve
full-lifecycle management of network slicing. In addition, the AI technology is introduced to
establish hierarchical and intelligent closed-loop for management and control, thereby
accomplishing the automatic deployment and verification of the whole process of the
slicing network from design, orchestration, service provisioning to monitoring.

In this verification, ZTE’s new-generation flagship product ZXCTN 9000-EA series were
deployed on core/aggregation layers of transport network, and the new-generation
large-capacity access product ZXCTN 6180H was deployed on the access layer, which
both adopt the 3-in-1 core chipsets with FlexE embedded.

By means of FlexE bonding, slicing bandwidth can scale flexibly on demand and provide
200GE and 400GE ports traffic solutions. In this way, the problem of unbalanced traffic in
traditional LAG bonding is solved.

Benefiting from the FlexE, the latency of the access-layer device at a single node is less
than 5us, and that of the core/aggregation-layer device at a single node is less than 20us,
which are both the industry’s lowest. Meanwhile, it greatly reduce the impact of jitter,
packet loss and delay caused by traffic burst in traditional networks. Thus, 0 packet loss
and us-level jitter can be achieved for VIP services.

Figure 2: Transport Slicing Planning

The successful deployment of end-to-end 5G network slicing in China Unicom Shenzhen

verified the feasibility of 5G network slicing in technical architecture, deployment mode,
service guarantee, and business model. It accelerates the commercial implementation of
5G network slicing, and promotes the innovative transformation of China Unicom
Shenzhen from traffic operation to precise operation based on slicing, which pushes it
forward in operation transformation and industrial upgrade.