Recently, MTN Group completed two trials including the Intelligent IP Private Line Solution and the Sleeping Cells Self-healing Solution on South Africa live networks for the first time in December 2021, which are also the first time in the African continent. This marks a new stage for MTN in terms of network autonomy and intelligence capability, and empowers MTN’s “Ambition2025” strategy.
Sleeping Cell Self-healing Solution with Cross-domain Fault Automation
Based on Huawei ADN (Autonomous Driving Network) Solution, MTN announced the deployment of high innovative use cases in MTN South Africa Johannesburg for sleeping cells self-healing with cross-domain fault automation for Radio Access Network services.
- Sleeping Cells Automated monitoring, detection, diagnosis and recovery – In the past, operating personnel were not able to detect cell level outage due to sleeping cells, resulting in poor service response or even service downtime from unknown cause. The sleeping cells self-healing solution provides automation of sleeping cell monitoring, detection, diagnosis and recovery. More than 80% of the poor service due to sleeping cells issues were resolved after the solution has been deployed.
- Cross-domain Fault Automation Increases Operational Efficiencies – In daily operation and maintenance, it can be challenging for operating personnel in NOC when locating network faults very often. It has been time consuming to understand the root cause of the problem remotely, hence during most of the cases, NOC manager has to send engineers onsite to solve the issues manually. In the case of large wireless site outages, it is difficult for the engineers to locate the problem, and determine whether if the problem arises from the wireless, transmission or other domains even during on-site operations.
The cross-domain fault automation capability is able to automatically perform diagnosis on the bulk of alarms and analyse the root cause of the problems across domains and manage to reduce the resolution time from 1 hour to 15 minutes after implementation.
The sleeping cell self-healing solution not only helps MTN prevent revenue loss, but also increases the operational efficiencies and strengthen the capability of network intelligence and automation, which empowers MTN to accelerate digital transformation progress.
Intelligent IP Private Line Solution
Connection and computing are the foundation of the digital economy. With the continuous improvement of network capabilities, cloud-based life and cloud-based services are closely related to everyone and enterprises. Cloud industry is a new blue ocean in Africa, MTN Group has started its strategic deployment in this area for a long time. Based on the MTN Ambition 2025 network strategy and “CASSI” as the delivery framework, MTN aim to build a new cloud-oriented network architecture and non-blocking agile bearer network.
Based on Huawei ADN (Autonomous Driving Network) solution, the live-network test of the intelligent IP private line solution completed a series of cases, including one-stop service provisioning, tenant-level SLA assurance, on-demand capacity expansion, and proactive O&M.
- One-stop Zero-touch Services Provisioning – After the hardware is installed, the CPE can go-online by automatically generating configurations, eliminating the need for complicated software configuration. In addition, the one-stop service provisioning based on SRv6 technology enables the CPE to implement plug-and-play.
- Topology Service Implements Intelligent Network Resources Scheduling – MTN is also a carrier that actively embraces the new SRv6 technology. SRv6 has unparalleled advantages in improving bearer network programmability, fast service provisioning, and cross-domain coordination. Based on Huawei iMaster NCE, MTN demonstrated intelligent path selection based on different SLA requirements on the live network.
- Tenant Self-Service & NOC Proactive Maintenance – The NOC engineers can use iMaster NCE to flexibly adjust the bandwidth of private line services to achieve real-time bandwidth acceleration or decrease. Solution introduces the telemetry and iFIT technologies to provide real-time visualization of network tenant-level service SLAs.
The innovative capabilities of the intelligent IP private line solution will help MTN fully unlock the value of the cloud and network, meet the digital requirements of the industries, and lead digital solutions for Africa’s progress.
MTN will continue to enrich these high value use cases, iteratively optimize the solution to evolve to the target network and service automation goals across planning, construction, operations, optimization, and marketing across end-to-end network and services life cycle stages. With a focus on achieving Self-X(self-fulfilling, self-healing, self-optimizing) capabilities and Zero-X(zero-touch, zero-wait, zero-trouble) user experiences, MTN aims to develop Autonomous Driving Network Solution capabilities to build an agile operational environment, construct high performance network and realize its Autonomous Networks strategy in collaboration with Huawei and extend better services across new business through pan-African backbone network, and other new technologies on 5G and Edge.