Export PDFWhat Is Experience Assurance?
Experience assurance ensures that networks are designed with capabilities of intelligent application identification and scheduling as well as VIP user experience assurance during network planning. In this way, bandwidth resources can be fully utilized during off-peak hours, and traffic of key applications and VIP users can be guaranteed when network congestion occurs. With the real-time experience measurement and management capabilities of networks, the O&M mode is changed from passive response to complaints to proactive awareness, and difficult-to-reproduce experience assurance problems can be accurately located and resolved, ensuring user application experience.
Why Do We Need Experience Assurance?
Today, automated applications and integrated management systems greatly improve service efficiency. However, mixed concurrency of heavy-traffic applications — such as file download, cloud disk synchronization, and system update — consumes much network bandwidth. This leads to interruptions in key applications such as audio and video conference, reducing office efficiency. In addition, networks only provide connections, but cannot identify VIP users. As such, all users on the network preempt network resources from each other.
To overcome this, traditional O&M ensures the experience of key applications through private lines, static QoS configuration for higher application priorities, and network freeze in advance. However, these solutions have limitations. For example, private lines can only ensure partial networks. Static QoS based on fixed IP addresses cannot match mainstream Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. Network freeze reduces network flexibility and increases costs, which cannot effectively ensure the experience of key applications.
In addition, the network scale increases exponentially, but the O&M manpower growth lags behind. The average number of devices managed by each person exceeds 1000. As a result, it is impossible to handle a large number of unexpected experience problems manually. Worse yet, due to the randomness of experience problems such as service packet loss and unexpected congestion, more than 90% of the problems are difficult to reproduce and locate. Ultimately, they remain unresolved and cause many complaints. In addition, hybrid transmission of multiple services such as audio and video services and remote desktop services easily causes air interface transmission conflicts. Traditional QoS can only preferentially schedule downlink services. When the egress gateway is congested, no adjustment method is available, and packets are discarded without differentiation at congestion points. As a result, SaaS service experience cannot be effectively guaranteed. These pain points make network experience assurance a core requirement for enterprise office and service operations, instead of an optional optimization item.
Experience Assurance Solution
To ensure application experience, Huawei proposes the concept of experience-centric network construction and O&M and service assurance solution.
- Experience-centric network construction: Networks are designed with capabilities of intelligent application identification and scheduling as well as VIP user experience assurance during network planning. In this way, bandwidth resources can be fully utilized during off-peak hours, and traffic of key applications and VIP users can be guaranteed when network congestion occurs.
Key technologies: intelligent application identification and scheduling, VIP bandwidth reservation, intelligent multimedia scheduling, and adaptive forward error correction (A-FEC)
- Experience-based O&M: With the real-time experience measurement and management capabilities of networks, the O&M mode is changed from passive response to complaints to proactive awareness, and difficult-to-reproduce experience assurance problems can be accurately located and resolved, ensuring user application experience.
Key technologies: Packet Conservation Algorithm for Internet (iPCA), intelligent simulation dialing test, and application digital map
Application Experience Assurance
Huawei uses the industry-exclusive XNA engine to ensure zero packet loss and zero video freezing for key applications, and to demarcate experience-related faults within 10 minutes. The XNA engine provides three capabilities: intelligent identification, intelligent scheduling, and experience measurement.
- Intelligent identification: It can identify 30,000 terminals, more than 6000 applications, and 300 Gbit/s bidirectional flows on the entire network.
- Intelligent scheduling: On wired networks, it preferentially schedules identified key services to ensure zero packet loss. On wireless networks, when air interface congestion causes experience deterioration, it can intelligently suppress background heavy-traffic services to significantly reduce the air interface delay and preferentially guarantee key services.
- Experience measurement: It uses intelligent simulation dialing test to measure and analyze the end to end (E2E) quality of key services, solving the problem that experience-related faults are difficult to reproduce and locate in traditional O&M. It enables O&M to shift from passive response to proactive discovery and accurate and fast demarcation.
VIP Experience Assurance
Huawei provides dedicated lanes for VIP users and terminals to deliver exclusive services. This ensures that VIP users have unaffected experience (< 50 ms delay) upon network congestion, and can use 20% higher bandwidth than common users in weak signal scenarios.
Huawei's exclusive FastPass technology reserves bandwidth resources for VIP users, allowing them to preempt bandwidth resources anytime and anywhere. When the network is congested (the channel utilization reaches 80%), the average delay of VIP users is reduced by 75% from 200 ms to less than 50 ms, and 99.9% of long-delayed packets are also eliminated.
Huawei exclusively supports per-packet power control for VIP users. This technology identifies packets of VIP users in a differentiated manner and increases the transmit power accordingly for each packet. This prevents interference to neighboring APs caused by overall AP power increase. In this way, VIP users can enjoy always-on signals and high bandwidth even if they are at the edge of wireless signal coverage. Compared with common users, VIP users can have 20% higher bandwidth.
WAN Interconnection Experience Assurance
Based on the SD-WAN architecture, WAN interconnection experience assurance uses technologies such as application-level intelligent traffic steering, A-FEC, and intelligent policy recommendation to ensure E2E experience of key applications and provide global optimization capabilities on WANs.
- Application-level intelligent traffic steering: Based on in-band flow measurement, this technology monitors the SLA (delay and packet loss rate) of applications in real time. If the network SLA does not meet application requirements, the primary and backup paths can be switched within seconds.
- A-FEC: This technology dynamically adds redundant packets when packet loss occurs on a link, ensuring that video freezing does not occur in harsh environments with a packet loss rate of up to 30%. In addition, the exclusive hardware acceleration technology ensures that the performance of a hub node enabled with A-FEC does not deteriorate, achieving industry-leading performance.
- Intelligent policy recommendation: It automatically identifies congested sites on the entire network and generates optimization policies to implement global load balancing. It can provide future bandwidth prediction based on big data analytics, providing a basis for capacity expansion. In addition, it uses proactive simulation detection to select the optimal access path for SaaS applications.
Application Digital Map
The application digital map supports specifying applications and displays paths of the specified applications on the physical network topology based on the iPCA measurement result and Intelligent Flow (iFlow) analysis result. The application digital map can display information about all flows of a specified application and hop-by-hop quality information (packet loss rate and delay) of each flow by site.
Key Technologies of Experience Assurance
Experience assurance is not a single function, but a systematic solution that consists of multiple core technologies. It introduces intelligent capabilities of service awareness, experience analysis, and dynamic control into traditional networks. It transforms a network from a passive connection pipe to a proactive intelligent platform that aims to ensure service experience. Experience assurance depends on the following key technologies:
Smart Application Control (SAC)
SAC is an intelligent application protocol identification and classification engine. It uses service awareness technology to detect and identify packets, and implements refined experience analysis and QoS policy control based on the classification result.
SAC working mechanism
High-Quality Cards Supporting Millions of Flow Tables
Application identification requires flow table resources. In the traditional solution, application identification is deployed at the access layer, which saves resources but cannot guarantee downlink traffic from the core layer to the access layer. In addition, policies are interrupted during terminal roaming. High-performance cards that support millions of flow tables are deployed at the core or aggregation layer to implement application identification on a campus network with 30,000 terminals. In addition, functions such as application identification-based preferential guarantee, iPCA, and simulation dialing test are supported.
iPCA
iPCA is an IP network performance measurement technology that directly marks service packets to measure packet loss on the network.
iFlow
iFlow is a measurement technology implemented at the transport layer. iFlow can monitor the quality of both long-flow and short-flow services, extending the full-lifecycle monitoring capability of key applications. It provides one-stop, visualized all-flow poor-QoE analysis services for applications and networks. The poor-QoE analysis results of iFlow can be used for application fault demarcation, enabling E2E visualization of application quality.
Intelligent Simulation Dialing Test
Intelligent simulation dialing test is a proactive detection technology that automatically identifies the address of the audio and video conference server, simulates the traffic characteristics of real applications, and proactively sends packets to detect network packet loss, delay, and jitter. As shown in the following figure, intelligent simulation dialing test and iPCA can be combined to quickly demarcate E2E application experience faults between LANs and WANs.
Intelligent Multimedia Scheduling
In multi-service and high-concurrency scenarios, it is difficult to guarantee the deterministic experience of real-time services such as audio and video services. To solve this problem, Huawei proposes the intelligent multimedia scheduling algorithm. This technology uses application identification to distinguish foreground services from background services, monitors the delay of foreground services, and then uses the congestion detection algorithm, congestion judgment algorithm, and congestion scheduling algorithm to implement dynamic intelligent control, ensuring the experience of key audio and video services.
Assurance for Desktop Cloud Applications
Cloud desktop office is an important application for ensuring office work. The cloud desktop server sends desktop images to terminals in the form of video streams. In this case, a longer delay leads to less responsive user operations, deteriorating the QoE. For example, during multi-channel concurrent transmission (15 channels of videos and 15 channels of PPT slides), videos freeze more frequently, severely affecting user experience. To solve this problem, you can configure experience assurance preferentially for the cloud desktop application when application identification is enabled, improving user experience.
Assurance for Collaborative Office Applications
High-density wireless office scenarios often face issues where greedy services (such as uploading and downloading in cloud disks) occupy air interface resources for a long time. This slows down operations such as loading images/videos in online documents and transferring files through instant messaging (IM) apps, affecting user experience. Assurance for collaborative office applications can be configured to ensure that images and videos can be inserted into documents during document editing, and the delay in uploading and downloading images and loading videos in IM apps can be reduced in congestion scenarios.
VIP FastPass
VIP FastPass is an enhancement to air interface bandwidth reservation for VIP users. This technology focuses on channel contention optimization for VIP packets on the air interface. After the VIP FastPass function is enabled, the device reserves specified time slices in the FastPass scheduling period. Within the reserved time slices, the air interface bandwidth is exclusively occupied by VIP users, and multiple VIP users are scheduled in polling mode. Within common contention time slices, the air interface bandwidth is reserved for both VIP users and common users based on air interface bandwidth reservation for VIP users and intelligent multimedia scheduling.
VIP FastPass mechanism
VIP Per-Packet Power Control
When a VIP STA moves or is associated with an AP far away from it, the negotiated bandwidth and throughput decrease as the distance between the STA and AP increases. The experience of such VIP STAs cannot be effectively improved by FastPass. To address this, the VIP per-packet power control technology is developed. With this technology, an AP dynamically measures the downlink signals received by a VIP STA and performs intelligent calculation: If the signals are weak (signal strength < –68 dBm), the AP adjusts the transmit power for the VIP STA on a per-packet basis. This increases the throughput of the VIP STA by more than 20%.
Typical Application Scenarios of Experience Assurance
Typical Application of Experience Assurance in Audio and Video Conferences
Online meeting applications have high requirements on network transmission quality. Video freezing and artifacts may occur in meetings, and are difficult to locate. The Wi-Fi load and interference are high, and the quality is unstable. As a result, the experience of VIP users cannot be guaranteed. High-quality cards and intelligent multimedia scheduling on the air interface can be deployed to ensure the priority of audio and video conferences, and in-band flow measurement can be used to locate and demarcate video conference network problems, ensuring zero packet loss in audio and video conferences on the campus network and demarcating video freezing problems within 5 minutes. The experience of VIP users is guaranteed, and high-priority network access is implemented in the VIP area. The air interface delay is less than 50 ms.
Typical application of experience assurance in audio and video conferences
Typical Application of Experience Assurance on Campus Networks
Devices on a campus network have been running for a long time, and are suffering from insufficient bandwidth and slow network speed. Experience-related network problems cannot be located, and troubleshooting is time-consuming. Key campus services such as important meetings and routine administration, scientific research, teaching, and office services are not guaranteed. To solve these pain points, Wi-Fi 7 is deployed to ensure the smooth running of key meetings, increase the download rate by four times, increase the user capacity by three times, and reduce the network delay by two times. iMaster NCE-CampusInsight is used for network O&M management, reducing O&M manpower. The experience of VIP users is guaranteed at the user level and application level, and dedicated network assurance is provided for key places in the administrative building, achieving zero video freezing for important meetings with high priority.
Typical application of experience assurance on campus networks
- Author： Mao Pengfei
- Updated on： 2026-02-05
- Views： 250
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