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China Telecom, China Unicom, ZTE unveil digital twin-based network assurance

Leading Chinese communications technology firm teams with local operators to apply the industry's first digital twin-based smart operation for the co-construction and sharing network during the 19th Asian Games, providing network assurance for users

Running for 16 days until 8 October, the 19th Asian Games concluded under the theme of Enduring Memories of Hangzhou, highlighting what the organisers said was the power and unity of sports. Off the track and field, ZTE Corporation, a global leading provider of China Telecom and China Unicom, said it has highlighted the power and unity of communications technology during the event with what they called the industry’s first digital twin-based smart operation for the co-construction and sharing network.

The Games saw around 12,000 athletes from 45 countries and regions participate in the capital of China’s Zhejiang province, making it the third time China has hosted the continental multi-sports event, following Beijing in 1990 and Guangzhou in 2010.

China Telecom and China Unicom claim to have jointly built the largest co-construction and sharing network in the world, and with the complexities of co-operation efficiency and decision-making, one of the most crucial challenges has been how to ensure smooth user experience – particularly during major events like the Asian Games.

To tackle these challenges, with a unified Digital Twin Network (DTN), a high-precision digital twin-based operation platform was established featuring a centralised and proactive operation mode, which assured an audience of about 600,000 across 48 matches held in 21 venues during the Asian Games. Using BIM modelling technology and GIS engine, 21 competition venues, surrounding environments and cell topologies were captured with 3D reconstruction.

ZTE added that with the positioning algorithm in meter-level, the spatial distribution of network indicators could be precisely demonstrated, while aligning service key quality indicators with network key performance indicators, enabling the co-operation team to spot the issue in real time.

With artificial intelligence (AI) and knowledge-driven digital twin modelling, the platform dynamically predicted peak traffic and estimated the trend of network, service and users to enable proactive problem-solving in advance with what ZTE said was 90% accuracy in problem detection. It was then able to perform online inference using datasets to derive the intelligent optimal tuning strategy.

China Telecom, China Unicom and ZTE said the utilisation of digital twins and data-driven AI model technologies shows the possibility and potential of co-operation efficiency improvement, as well as cost savings for the co-construction and sharing network. Going forward, they said they would further strengthen their collaboration in various scenarios, aiming to create more flexible, efficient and intelligent networks.

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As the deployment was being made, marking its first launch of an industry production site empowered by 5G for overseas markets, ZTE released a 5G-based industrial field network whitepaper. The document looked at the capabilities for scenarios in the production and manufacturing fields in response to what ZTE said was a strong demand for low latency, low jitter and high reliability.

The whitepaper identified key capabilities required for 5G industrial on-site networks in production scenarios, and also looked to address the rapid iteration and changes that occur in commodity production by providing a series of solutions for network and computing integration, service guarantee and all-round “self-serving” capabilities, to help promote the deepening of 5G applications in industrial field networks and empower the intelligent transformation of production domains.

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