This article takes you to understand what is an IP dedicated line
370 2023-03-28

Foreword

IP private line is a private line technology with the characteristics of shortest path interconnection, flexible granularity, and visible SLA. As the digital transformation of enterprises has brought about the trend of accelerating enterprise services to the cloud, enterprises have increasing demands for IP private lines. SLA guarantees, fast provisioning, and bandwidth self-service on demand have become the basic demands of enterprises. Changes in enterprise services place higher demands on the leased lines provided by operators. In order to help operators create differentiated advantages, the IP private line solution came into being. With SRv6 (Segment Routing IPv6, segment routing based on IPv6 forwarding plane) and SDN (Software-Defined Networking, software-defined network) technologies, the leased line The technical requirements of the intermediate network help operators make full use of the existing network, quickly open IP private lines, and seize market opportunities. With the help of NCE (Network Cloud Engine, network cloud engine), the resources of the entire network can be visualized, and the SLA of enterprise private lines can be guaranteed on demand. Help operators provide high-quality IP private line services.

 

01  Why do you need an IP dedicated line?

Dedicated line means that operators rely on domestic backbone network and broadband metropolitan area network resources to provide dedicated line access methods to provide enterprises, governments and other customers with higher data access requirements with more high-quality professional services. With the rapid development of digital transformation and cloud-based applications, the business flow and traffic structure of enterprises have changed. In pursuit of higher operational efficiency, lower costs, and higher data security, enterprises regard cloud migration and business cloudification as the main trend of current business development, and at the same time put forward demands for flexible networking, agile interconnection, and flexible bandwidth. Therefore, changes in enterprise services place higher demands on the leased lines provided by operators. Currently, the dedicated line service market presents the following trends.

 

Enterprise cloud drives private line business to continue to grow

In the wave of enterprise digitization, massive opportunities have emerged. The digital transformation of enterprises presents the trend of cloudification, videoization, and 5G, and different business requirements have evolved from this. As an operator, it is necessary to provide enterprise customers with "dedicated line + cloud + X" services to build differentiated competitiveness with other operators and OTT services (Over-the-top media service).

 

High ROI drives independent network construction

In recent years, the business flow of enterprises has shown a trend of concentration. Therefore, for business-intensive areas, there are a lot of potential opportunities in the private line market. Establishing private network services for valuable customers in this region will translate into high ROI (Return on investment, return on income). The potential market return of the private line market drives the accelerated establishment of private line networks.

 

Existing MSTP equipment is aging and has begun to fully migrate to IP leased lines

Among the current leased line services, MSTP (Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol, Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol) leased lines account for a high proportion. However, the millions of MSTP devices currently in use on the live network have problems such as aging, no standard evolution, and resource exhaustion. As a result, a large number of low-end private line services on the live network cannot continue to expand in the future. Compared with IP dedicated lines, MSTP dedicated lines have poorer bandwidth adjustment capabilities, and the bandwidth utilization rate is not high when carrying data services. In addition, traditional MSTP leased lines are complex across domains and need to integrate multiple access networks. IP private lines solve the pain points of MSTP private lines, so MSTP private lines began to be upgraded and migrated to IP private lines on a large scale.

 

Faced with the above demands, the IP private line solution emerged as the times require, and its intelligence provides differentiated competitiveness for operators. IP private line can provide enterprise users with a high-quality bearer network with large bandwidth, low end-to-end delay, fast provisioning, and agile adjustment. assistant.

 

02 What is the core value of IP private line?

The main value of IP private line is brought by the intelligent architecture. The IP private line solution uses SDN to realize the intelligence of its architecture, forming a core competitiveness different from other private lines. The IP private line solution is divided into business operation layer, business collaboration layer, network management and control layer, and network bearer layer from top to bottom. NCE, as the network intelligent brain supporting the IP private line solution, integrates management, control, and analysis, and southbound Centralized management, control, and analysis of the global network are realized, and open network APIs are provided for northbound connection with upper-layer systems for rapid integration. The following figure shows the IP private line network architecture.

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IP private line network architecture

 

The IP private line network architecture mainly has the following advantages:

 

Elasticity and high reliability

As the bearer basis of the IP private line solution, NCE provides flexible bearer architecture and high-availability bearer support capabilities for various leased line services. NCE can configure minute-level BOD to achieve high elastic bandwidth capability, cope with the tide of network traffic brought by the flow of people, and adjust bandwidth on demand during peak hours. NCE analyzes and collects SLA information of network elements and links, such as network-wide delay maps, calculates service paths, and delivers policies to devices. Construct high-reliability bearers from equipment, network, and service layers to achieve end-to-end high availability and 50ms fast protection switching for all services.

 

Agile service deployment

The IP dedicated line utilizes the flexibility of the IP network to implement multiple services on the front line, providing a bearer foundation for business agility. NCE northbound provides open APIs oriented to business intent, supports rapid integration with upper-layer OSS/collaborators, and three-party CSPs, and southbound is compatible with stock and three-party networks, making end-to-end service agile provisioning on the entire network easier. After the enterprise customer completes the application, modification or change of service through the self-service interface, the operator can complete the service issuance for the enterprise within minutes. Reduce the waiting time for traditional private lines to take effect, and help operators improve the private line experience of enterprise users.

 

Business SLA can guarantee and promise

Based on IFIT/TWAMP/Y.1731 detection and Telemetry collection, real-time accurate perception and visualization of tenant-level end-to-end business performance data is realized. NCE unifies the network-wide centralized path calculation, reasonably plans and guarantees private line service SLAs, and supports refined management and active optimization guarantees for high-value private line service SLAs.

 

Business intelligence operation and maintenance management

The NCE intelligent analysis engine is introduced to realize minute-level fault location and predictive maintenance based on big data and AI.

 

03 Main Application Scenarios of IP Private Line

 

IP private lines mainly have the following three application scenarios: cloud backbone network, industry IP private network, and high-quality IP private line.

 

Cloud backbone network

 

In order to meet the needs of enterprises to migrate to the cloud and solve the pain points of the current multi-network and multi-cloud integration difficulties, the IP dedicated line solution designs cloud backbone network scenarios for operators to realize cloud-network integration. Operators can take advantage of wide-coverage network resources, rich IDC resources, and localized personal services to build a cloud backbone private network and openly integrate with multiple clouds to avoid data loss due to public cloud failures. -the-top media service, over-the-top content service) bypasses the backbone traffic, and compresses the OTT business scope to cloud services.

 

The cloud backbone network is a bridge for cloud-network integration. It meets the requirements of cloud services with large bandwidth, low latency, high reliability, high security, and business agility. It uses SRv6 route selection and optimization technology to ensure SLA. The following figure is a schematic diagram of the cloud backbone solution. The cloud backbone is connected to the cloud and the MAN, and the overall architecture is controlled by SDN; the cloud is the entrance, and the controller is open to the north to the API.

 

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The cloud backbone network has the following characteristics:

1 Provide one-stop ICT services for enterprises.

2 Dedicated line resources can be flexibly adjusted.

3 Save costs by utilizing old existing IPv6 networks. It is supported to upgrade only the nodes at both ends to SRv6 devices, and enable IPv6 forwarding on the intermediate nodes.

4 To meet the demands of different enterprises. Meet the online self-service order combination needs of small, medium and micro enterprises; meet the needs of large and medium-sized enterprises with public cloud + private cloud hybrid cloud, disaster recovery and migration professional services.

 

Industry IP private network

 

The industrial IP private network is a service bearing solution based on network slicing, which realizes resource reservation on the device side and life cycle management of controller slices, ensuring that high-value services are not affected by other services. On the device side, resource isolation is implemented through the FlexE/channelized sub-interface, and the controller NCE implements slice creation, visualization, and other slice automation management. Fragmentation is decoupled from business. Fragmentation is equivalent to physical network (resource guarantee), and VPN service (service isolation) can be deployed on this fragmentation plane. The following figure is a schematic diagram of an industrial IP private network. Through the industrial IP private network solution, one physical network is used to carry financial, government affairs, medical services and other services at the same time. The services of each industry are hard-isolated from each other, while ensuring bandwidth and high service security.

 

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Industrial IP private network services can be divided into two basic bearer scenarios: point-to-point private line (P2P) and multipoint-to-multipoint private line (MP2MP). Among them, there are the following three SLA guarantee schemes for point-to-point private lines:

 

 

Utilize QOS queues (AF, etc.) to schedule bandwidth: Map private lines to fixed AF queues for forwarding guarantee, NCE controls the total point-to-point bandwidth of dedicated lines not to exceed the bandwidth of AF queues, and guarantees the bandwidth of point-to-point private lines.

 

Use FlexE and channelized sub-interface technology to isolate dedicated line slices: When the types of network services gradually increase, the port 8 queue is not enough, or when further QoS scheduling in the slice is required, more resources are isolated through slice technology such as FlexE Bearer leased line, and services between slices do not affect each other, and NCE controls the total bandwidth of leased line point pairs not to exceed the slice bandwidth.

 

Hop-by-hop resource isolation: For scenarios where a small number of customers have strict requirements on dedicated line resource isolation, point-to-point dedicated lines with hop-by-hop reserved bandwidth guarantee are provided.

 

Compared with the point-to-point private line service, the multipoint-to-multipoint network private line is also based on the guarantee of QoS queue scheduling resources, and resource isolation guarantee fragmentation such as FlexE/channelized sub-interfaces. The isolated shards can be exclusive to one business or shared by multiple businesses. The main difference between the two is that the service flow and flow of multipoint-to-multipoint networking are uncertain, so it is difficult to determine an appropriate bandwidth to obtain the size of the fragment.

 

Industrial IP private network services meet high-value customer isolation SLA requirements, realize flexible reuse of one network, reduce construction and maintenance costs, increase operators‘ revenue, and solve the pain point of traditional networks with high costs for each field.

 

High-quality IP dedicated line

 

The high-quality IP dedicated line solution is mainly used in IP RAN (IP radio access network, IP-based radio access network) integrated bearer service scenarios. IP RAN has the advantages of wide coverage and matching MSTP coverage. As MSTP equipment withdraws from the network on a large scale, currently millions of private lines are gradually migrating to IP RAN network. When IP RAN mobile bearer access does not form a loop, high-burst mobile services will affect private line services. The high-quality IP dedicated line solves the above pain points and provides highly reliable service guarantee for IP RAN business scenarios. The following figure is a schematic diagram of a high-quality IP private line, which applies E2E SRv6 to provide delay/bandwidth-based service path customization capabilities; the NCE controller unifies IP RAN/backbone network configuration and maintenance for the entire network. Moreover, the solution has IFIT second-level detection capability, realizes fast convergence of 50ms-level service path faults, and detects and reports connectivity faults in seconds.

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The high-quality IP private line solution has the following characteristics:

 

Large bandwidth meets industry video upgrade demands.

 

SRv6 provides fast service deployment to improve O&M efficiency.

 

The network topology of the networking/cloud private line and high-precision SLA detection at the business level can report business statistics in seconds to achieve graphical presentation.

 

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