Huawei held an online IP Gala meeting with its industry partners to introduce the Key Architecture Index (KAI) and share its applications.
The conference was held during the AfricaCom even from November 9-12, which was also part of the virtual Africa Tech Festival.
The theme of the conference was “Leading intelligent IP networks, accelerating intelligent connectivity”.
In the carrier environment, the IP network enables fixed-mobile convergence, network evolution and the shift towards multi-services and the cloud era.
Currently, a challenge facing most IP (internet protocol) networks is unnecessary complexity, due to a lack of IP architecture standardisation.
Most networks were built without adequate foresight, and next-generation networks, be they 3G, 4G or 5G, were built on top of existing networks. This created network complexities around lack of visibility, management and control.
To this end, KAI architecture specifically addresses complexity challenges, enabling future-ready networks with easy integration, visibility, management and control, by measuring five dimensions of the transport network.
The KAI model indexes are Congestion Free, Scalability, Simplification, Always-on and Intelligence. Each dimension is evaluated across the optical, IP and the manager/controller/analyzer layer.
“We have to forever simplify our networks while moving to intelligent self-driving autonomous networks,” said Samuel Chen, Director of Huawei Southern Africa Marketing & Solution Sales Department at the conference.
“The KAI model helps measure the results at an acceptable level across all of our offering portfolio so that we can realise a cloud-native based approach to monitoring the architecture,” said Hugh Ujhazy, Vice President, IOT & Telecom at IDC.
“User experience is not only related to the wireless network, but to all aspects that form part of the service chain – from the customer to the core of the network,” said Zoltan Miklos, General Manager of Network Planning at MTN South Africa.
Miklos added that MTN was working hard to improve network architecture and was achieving excellent packet-lose rates of less than 10-4 across its entire network. The continuous P3 best-in-test achievements MTN has obtained were testimony to this.
“We need to think not just as box layers. We need to think about the system layers, the architecture layers,” said Tony Hu, Huawei vice president of Data Communication Product Line. “We need to rethink how services will be running on future IP networks and how to evolve our current networks for the future.”
