Huawei revs up Flow Engine for traffic management

Huawei has launched what it is calling the first SDN traffic optimisation engine for carrier-grade networks, which it said can improve network throughput by up to 60 percent.

The Flow Engine has been trialled with several operators and is part of the vendor’s wider cloud-based SoftCOM strategy. Huawei’s proprietary algorithm suite uses the likes of graph transformation, linear programming decomposition and matrix reduction to reduce the time it takes to make traffic management decisions on carrier grade networks to seconds.
 

The China-based vendor said the software is able to spot changes in traffic flow or spikes and reroute data automatically. Further it said it would solve traffic issues on large-scale networks.

Distributed routers in existing networks can lead to traffic congestion in some parts of the infrastructure, while resources are left dormant elsewhere. Huawei said its algorithm suite was built to handle the tens of billions of decision variables and hundreds of millions of constraints that exist with traffic flow.

Telefónica and Deutsche Telekom are trialling SDN and NFV, currently, but it is expected that it will take a decade for SDN to be fully installed into networks, with operators continuing to trial different service during the next 18 months.

Meanwhile, Huawei has become the latest vendor to be signed up by Vodafone for its Project Spring infrastructure deployment. It won a five year contract to expand SingleRAN globally across 15 territories including UK, Germany, Italy and Spain. Last month, Vodafone also signed up Ericsson and NSN to work on its ambitious €8.1 billion project.