What Is CloudCampus?

Poor Wireless Network Experience

On campuses, wireless networks are no longer just supplements to wired networks, but have become indispensable. Some scenarios even use wireless connections exclusively. For example, as mobile office becomes commonplace, offices become more open and intelligent and fully covered by Wi-Fi, with some office areas having no wired network ports whatsoever. In this scenario, enterprises face the following challenges to ensure optimal wireless network experience.

• Insufficient wireless bandwidth: Wireless networks need to support both existing services migrated from wired networks (such as enterprise cloud desktop office, telepresence conference, and 4K video) and new services such as VR/AR and virtual assistant. The proportion of user traffic that is voice and video traffic keeps increasing, and the bandwidth required by a single user surges from 10 Mbit/s to 50 Mbit/s. All this requires wireless networks to provide higher bandwidth.
• Poor concurrency experience, severe co-channel interference in high-density office scenarios: As services go wireless, the number of access terminals has surged. A user who used to connect one terminal to the network now connects three to five terminals, meaning that a single AP must support far more terminals. In addition, compared with wired point-to-point closed communication, the air interface of wireless communication serves as a shared medium and an open physical environment. The MAC layer of 802.11 uses carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) to control data transmission and reception of wireless terminals. With this mechanism, as the number of access users grows, the overall communication bandwidth of a channel decreases, resulting in poor concurrency experience.
• Eavesdropping risks on the air interface: With a shift from wired networks to wireless Wi-Fi networks, the air interface becomes the medium for information transmission. As this method blurs the boundaries of networks, it introduces the risk of eavesdropping.

No Assurance for New Applications

In the transformation of all sectors towards intelligence, automatic applications and integrated management systems have greatly improved service efficiency. In 2022, Huawei held 5.91 million video conferences. In the education industry, smart classrooms have become more and more commonplace, and many schools have adopted remote teaching and XR teaching. Various new applications and terminals have become production tools, but often encounter the following problems:

• Concurrent use of bandwidth-hungry applications, such as file download, cloud disk synchronization, and system upgrade, consumes huge network bandwidth. This causes freezing of key applications such as voice and video conferencing, reducing office efficiency.
• 70% of conference freezing is caused by network issues, many of which are unexpected and temporary. By the time IT personnel are asked to rectify such issues, the issues have already disappeared. As a result, the issues occur repeatedly and are never fully resolved.
• VIP people and things do not have VIP experience. Networks only provide connections, but cannot identify VIPs, leaving all users to preempt network resources from each other.

No assurance for new applications

Low Network O&M Efficiency

Before online maps became the norm, we had to often rely on our own memory or physical maps and road signs to get to a destination. We may not be aware of any changes in road conditions on the route ahead, and so end up taking a long route. Online maps make this a thing of the past. They turn the traditional static geographic map into a dynamic and real-time digital world. With it, we can get the latest traffic data in real time, such as congestion and road closure information, improving our travel experience.

As the foundation of digital infrastructure, network connectivity plays an increasingly important role in promoting digital transformation across industries. As digital transformation gathers pace, enterprise services are developing rapidly and networks are drastically growing in both scale and complexity. However, the number of network O&M personnel of enterprises does not increase at the same rate, meaning that the O&M personnel have to do more. To add insult to injury, there is no unified map that can centrally display the enterprise network health, leading to a poor network experience, numerous complaints about network faults, and inefficient fault rectification. This ultimately slows down the digital transformation of enterprises. The main pain points are as follows:

First, network information is scattered, the inspection period is long, and service experience is invisible: Network and device information, such as the device list, user list, and alarm list, is scattered. One inspection involves hundreds of steps and takes more than an hour, but can only help detect device faults, instead of the actual network experience of users and applications.

Second, faults are difficult to locate: Due to a lack of efficient locating and rectification methods, troubleshooting faults that do not recur takes a long time.

Third, it is difficult to guarantee experience: Traditional configuration methods are complex and have a large number of parameters. When service departments raise new requirements, network engineers cannot promptly respond to them and have to configure devices one by one. In addition, network configuration depends on expert experience, resulting in high labor costs.

To address the challenges facing wireless networks, new application assurance, and network O&M, Huawei launches the next-generation campus network solution: Xinghe Intelligent Campus Solution.

Wireless Experience Upgrade

Huawei Wi-Fi 7 is one generation ahead of the industry. According to a Tolly test report, the single-user rate of Huawei Wi-Fi 7 can reach 4.3 Gbit/s, three times higher than Wi-Fi 6; a single AP can support up to 120 channels of HD video conferences, with a significantly higher concurrency capability. This truly achieves 10GE to rooms and APs. In addition, Wi-Fi 7 works in conjunction with multi-GE interfaces to achieve on-demand and flexible upgrade of uplink interface bandwidth without replacing cables.

Application Experience Upgrade

Over 6000 applications are accurately identified, and elastic slicing enables key applications to exclusively use "fast lanes". In experience assurance, the key is to guarantee the experience of voice and video applications as well as VIP users. The intelligent scheduling engine on APs and switches can identify and preferentially schedule video conferencing applications, so that they are always on the "fast lanes". Huawei's solution achieves proactive support for VIP users, through a dynamic resource pool on the AP side. With certain amounts of bandwidth reserved, VIP users are given priority for accessing air interface resources during busy periods. The solution also offers quick response to experience issues. With Huawei's in-band flow measurement technology, network engineers can see the network status of each NE traversed by application traffic in real time to gain insight into the network experience, so that they can locate faults within minutes.

O&M Experience Upgrade

The network digital map function of Huawei iMaster NCE-Campus provides full visibility at four levels: networks, terminals, users, and applications. It enables one-click locating of root causes and replaces manual analysis during maintenance. The function uses advanced technologies such as big data computing engine, artificial intelligence (AI), and search algorithms to achieve four-dimensional campus visualization, fault demarcation and locating, and deterministic application experience assurance. With these, O&M is no longer based on the static topology but on the dynamic HD digital map. In this way, network engineers can see the network status on one map, demarcate faults and issues in one second, and optimize key services with one click.

Wi-Fi 7 Shield Secures Air Interface Transmission

Leveraging the beamforming capability of APs, Huawei's Wi-Fi Shield technology in Wi-Fi 7 sends extra interference signals. Malicious users can only receive a disordered superposition of the valid signals and interference signals, and cannot demodulate the signals. In other words, they cannot even intercept the signals.

As shown in the following figure, an AP has multiple antennas; when signals of different antennas are superimposed, they affect each other. Beamforming changes the shape of beams by compensating phases of transmit antennas. As such, wireless signals can be transmitted to target STAs in a centralized and directional manner.

Beamforming implementation

However, in general radio signal transmission, although a sending direction may be adjusted, a receiving location is not accurate enough. In addition to the main lobe area with the most concentrated energy, some energy is usually distributed to the side lobe area. As a result, signals may also be received at other locations. To make the signal receiving location more accurate, Wi-Fi Shield uses an additional antenna to transmit interference signals. After a STA that needs to be protected normally accesses the Wi-Fi network, the AP determines the location of the STA before sending data, and adjusts the transmission direction of the interference signal based on the location information. In this way, the interference is 0 only at the location of the target STA, and the data received by the authorized user is not affected. Interference signals overlap with valid signals at other positions and cannot be identified, causing a data demodulation failure for unauthorized STAs.

Working principles of Wi-Fi Shield

To ensure that the target STA is protected while it is moving, Wi-Fi Shield dynamically updates the location information of the STA, ensuring consistent Wi-Fi security for users wherever they go. Compared with smart antennas featuring always-on signals for users, Wi-Fi Shield has different principles and purposes. Smart antennas directly adjust the direction of valid signals to enhance signal strength. In contrast, Wi-Fi Shield adjusts the direction of interference signals to accurately send data in point-to-point mode.

Even when there are multiple users on the network, Wi-Fi Shield can still ensure data security of these users. If there are multiple STAs to be protected, Wi-Fi Shield provides independent protection for each STA, customizing interference signals when data is sent to each STA.

iPCA In-Band Flow Measurement Quickly Demarcates Application-Level Faults

Packet Conservation Algorithm for Internet (iPCA) is used to measure IP network performance. It colors service packets to measure the latency of network devices. In the Xinghe Intelligent Campus Solution, iPCA collaborates with the intelligent O&M platform iMaster NCE-CampusInsight to quickly locate faults and speed up the O&M. iPCA periodically reports the traffic and packet forwarding latency of each device on the campus network to iMaster NCE-CampusInsight. iMaster NCE-CampusInsight summarizes the data of each device, and compares and analyzes the data to identify any devices with excessive packet loss or forwarding latency, which helps you locate and demarcate faults faster.

To measure the packet loss rate and latency, iPCA introduces a coloring mechanism: A bit in a packet is used as the color bit and is set to 0 or 1 cyclically for devices to collect statistics on the number of packets and latency. In the following figure, within the same period of time, port 1 colors incoming IP packets, port 2 counts the number of outgoing IP packets as 1000, and port 3 counts the number of incoming IP packets as 900. By calculation, it can be determined that packet loss occurs on the "ACH2" link and the packet loss rate reaches 10%. Based on the analysis result, the O&M personnel only need to focus on "ACH2".

iPCA packet loss measurement

Digital Map Creates New Experience for Visualized O&M

The digital map of Huawei Xinghe Intelligent Campus Solution provides one-map network visibility, one-second fault demarcation, and one-click network optimization capabilities, which are made possible by a combination of different technologies: Telemetry in push mode provides a vast amount of data for the digital map. Big data analytics and machine learning help identify potential network faults and determine their root causes. AI-based intelligent network topology restoration and GIS map display capabilities restore the network topology and enable path navigation and E2E service visualization.

Network digital map collecting massive data using telemetry