How Autonomous Networks Are Driving Telecom Industry Transformation

At the MWC 2021 Shanghai Intelligent Autonomous Network Summit, Huawei’s Chief Strategy Officer for Digital Transformation, Dr. Che Haiping, delivered the keynote “Mobilizing Network Autonomy to Accelerate Industry Transformation.” He argued that digital transformation across all industries is pulling ICT technology and industry structure into a new era, moving humanity from “weak connectivity” through “broad connectivity” toward “intelligent connectivity.”

The Autonomous Networks industry initiative, similar to Industry 4.0 for manufacturing, is driving a comprehensive upgrade of telecom service equipment, production services, and network product offerings.

COVID‑19 has further highlighted the need for flexible, customized network services, prompting the industry to pursue simplified, automated, intelligent, and collaborative production architectures, marking a new cycle of architectural innovation in telecom.

Operators are building a flexible production model—“product on demand, service orchestrated”—through intelligent production equipment and flattened management systems, creating an open, collaborative digital ecosystem that enhances economic efficiency and serves as the ICT foundation for the intelligent society and digital economy.

The Autonomous Networks initiative has become a widely recognized core concern for telecom network intelligence upgrades.

Dr. Che stated, “The Autonomous Networks initiative defines a new paradigm for network and operation architectures, optimizing production cost structures, enhancing end‑to‑end production flexibility and business agility, essentially making Autonomous Networks the Industry 4.0 of telecom.”

Huawei’s Autonomous Driving Network (ADN) solution follows the TM Forum’s layered closed‑loop collaborative architecture, delivering intelligent networking and operation innovations across wireless, wired, IP transport, optical, core, and data‑center domains, and enabling two major shifts:

Shift 1: From Function to Intent – Defining Autonomous Domain Standards

To achieve Level‑5 autonomous networks, the industry introduced the “Autonomous Domain” concept, upgrading network production units from executing functions to executing intents. Based on the autonomous domain as the management object, a flat architecture of “single‑domain autonomy” and “cross‑domain collaboration” is built, simplifying cross‑domain coordination, improving decision efficiency, and enhancing end‑to‑end agility.

Shift 2: From Feasibility to Usability – Building an Industry Knowledge Ecosystem

Industry‑specific operational knowledge, long trapped in inefficient project‑based integration, must evolve into a productized, component‑based, orchestrated, and performance‑priced offering. Accelerating DataOps, ModelOps, and DevOps, and leveraging cloud‑edge collaborative architectures, will continuously inject and evolve models, making networks increasingly intelligent.

Since 2020, Huawei’s ADN products have achieved notable success: the iMaster NCE has been recognized four times as the most competitive WAN SDN controller, and launched the L3 autonomous network solution for data‑center networks; iMaster MAE won the 2020 Communications World Outstanding Solution award; the xExpress/xTurbo/xSuite series have been deployed globally; and iMaster NAIE supports intelligent features with over 100 global sites in 2020.

Huawei calls on the industry to clarify Autonomous Networks grading standards and evaluation methods, accelerate intent‑based API innovation, and jointly define the industry’s rhythm.

Huawei will continue to align with global operators, deepen cooperation with partners, and co‑build an open collaborative ecosystem to scale autonomous network applications and fuel high‑quality digital economic development.