JOHN WILLIAMSON NETWORK AUTOMATION
AUTO MOTIVES: OPTICAL NETWORK AUTOMATION BOOMS
Automation methodologies, tools and systems are currently attracting much interest, investment and deployments from optical network operators and service providers. Veteran telecoms journalist John Williamson takes a deep dive into the future of network management.
“According to a recent survey of global network operators conducted by Heavy Reading, more than half of respondents already have at least partial transport network automation,” confirms Marie Fiala, director, Portfolio Marketing at optical and routing systems, services, and automation software company Ciena. “Moreover, within the next three years, the majority of operators anticipate surpassing this level thanks to the introduction of intent-based and closed-loop automation over a range of use cases.” “Automation plays an important role across the entire network lifecycle from initial planning and design, to construction, and ongoing maintenance,” adds Steve Tongish, CMO at geospatial network management software provider IQGeo. “Enhanced optical network automation drives faster time-to-revenue, reduced costs, and greater design efficiency, enabling providers to deliver services more quickly and win customers by being the first to serve high-value areas,” states Nir Hollander, general manager at Amdocs Mobile Networks. “Automation streamlines processes like high-level design drafting and field deployments, optimising resource allocation and prioritising investments in areas with the best ROI.” AUTOMATIC DRIVERS There are a number of factors driving this focus on network automation. One is the escalating complexity of optical networks, and the diversifying application repertoire required by a growing cohort of users and suppliers. Related to this are the shortages of human workforce skills that are needed to meet the challenges of the newly emerging networking
landscape. Tongish declares: “There is a shortage of skilled engineering talent and that manifests itself in a variety of different ways. The ability to roll things out and compete will be impacted by that.” He also distinguishes between the ‘non-digital natives’ and the ‘digital natives’, and the sometimes crude tools the former encounter in their workplaces compared to the sophisticated tools that the latter are accustomed to in their private capacities. A third non-trivial consideration here is rising concern about their bottom lines among optical network builders and operators. WAYS AND MEANS There’s a range of tools and technologies that can facilitate optical network automation and enhance it. Jelena Pesic, Director of Optical Strategy in Nokia’s CTO Office, instances leveraging of northbound-facing APIs to provide a functional abstraction of the network layer, thereby facilitating the automation of service fulfilment and seamless integration with higher-level OSS and BSS. In addition, she includes: the adoption of open standardisation protocols, such as NETCONF/YANG with OpenConfig or transport APIs, as essential for facilitating the management of multi-domain and multilayer networks; the integration of workflow management capabilities; converged automation platforms; real-time network telemetry (streaming telemetry) and predictive alerting, automated network spectral planning and optimisation; and advanced troubleshooting analysis tools, such as using optical time domain reflectometry (OTDR) baselining and event location detection. Fiala also stresses the importance of APIs. “To enhance optical network
automation, it’s important to prioritise the use of open APIs, which facilitate seamless interoperability between network controllers and the OSS layer,” she asserts. “The goal is end-to-end automation of operational workflows between different software systems.” VIRTUALISATION SDN/NFV and virtualisation are key network automation enablers. Fiala acknowledges that SDN is the foundation of automation, but says that while the initial concept of SDN focused on centralising control functions, a more practical approach has emerged, “Today, certain control functions, like real-time IP routing decisions, remain with the network element because of latency requirements. And, centralised controllers handle functions such as path computation for traffic-engineered tunnels and network health analysis.” Fiala also observes that there are different considerations for the automation of virtualised network functions, but automation and NFV are not interdependent - that is, automation can be applied equally well across hardware network elements, regardless of virtualisation. “More interestingly, NFV features come into play as modern network controllers are themselves “virtualised” as cloud-native platforms,” she comments. “This allows them to be deployed in the cloud, leveraging elastic compute and memory resources.” AI? AYE… Will AI/ML play an important role in future automation scenarios? In Hollander’s reading of the runes, improvements come from integrating AI-driven tools to enhance design quality, accelerate knowledge gathering
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| ISSUE 40 | Q1 2025
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