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Digital Challenges Faced By a Global Aviation Hub

Dubai is a highly developed city stretching along the gold coast of the Arabian Gulf, and the most populous city in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The city also attracts global attention with its stunning vistas, where skyscrapers contrast finely with the golden coast, and timeless traditions blend with modern marvels. As the economic center of the Middle East and an important global aviation hub, Dubai has two major airports — Dubai International Airport (DXB) and Al Maktoum International Airport (DWC) — making it a strategic fulcrum of the global aviation network. These airports can ensure the operation of more than 1500 flights per day and a passenger throughput of over 120 million per year.

"The increasing number of airport services poses high requirements on our team. We expect to use AI to propel the comprehensive upgrade of smart airports," said from Ghazi Al Hai, Head of Infrastructure Program and BT Governance from Dubai Airports. "For example, the intelligent scheduling system can optimize airspace resources in real time, the millimeter-wave security check devices can implement contactless quick customs clearance, the ultra-HD video analysis platform can automatically identifies abnormal behavior, and drone clusters can automatically perform runway inspection. Therefore, a secure and reliable network is required to support our business development."

However, the existing transmission devices between the two airports have reached end of service (EOS), and the technologies are outdated. This results in increasing fault rates and surging O&M costs, failing to ensure secure and reliable network operations. This is a major roadblock to the intelligent development of airports. In addition, because Dubai has a desert climate with extremely high temperatures in summer and frequent sandstorms, fiber deterioration is a major issue. On top of that, large-scale infrastructure construction and excavation lead to frequent underground optical cable cuts, presenting great challenges to network O&M. To cope with these issues, the customer urgently needs a unified optical network with ultra-large capacity, ultra-high reliability, and future-oriented evolution to ensure 24/7 uninterrupted core services between the two airports. Intelligent O&M methods are also required to improve O&M efficiency.

High-Bandwidth, Low-Latency, and Highly Reliable All-Optical Base

After comparing the solutions of multiple technology vendors, Dubai Airports finally selected Huawei, the leading vendor in the optical transmission field. To deliver the high-speed transmission, high throughput, and high availability required by applications and services deployed between the two airports, Huawei's F5G all-optical solution is used. In this solution, Huawei's OptiXtrans E9600 optical transmission platform is deployed to meet both current service requirements and the requirements of high-speed development in the future.

• Ultra-long-haul transmission: The optical-layer design is optimized to achieve ultra-long-haul transmission over 200 km. Automatic power tuning and intelligent dispersion compensation are supported, which completely solves the fiber attenuation issue on the live network.

• Flexible access of all services: The client side is compatible with multi-service interfaces such as GE, 10GE, 40GE, and 100GE, meeting various access requirements in multiple scenarios such as air traffic control data, security check system, and passenger service between two airports. This lays a solid connectivity base for smart airport construction.

• High reliability and low latency: Physical dual-route optical cables are deployed between the two airports, achieving one-hop connection at the optical layer and μs-level latency. Service self-healing can be completed within 50 ms after an optical cable cut, ensuring that core services such as flight scheduling and security check systems are always online.

• Smooth evolution towards the future: The single-wavelength rate can be upgraded to 400G, 800G, and 1.2T, and the optical spectrum can be extended to C+L band. The current network capacity can reach 24 Tbps, which can be quickly expanded to 96 Tbps per fiber in the future, meeting the evolution requirements of smart Dubai Airports over the next decade.

Huawei iMaster NCE-T: Proactive O&M, Efficient Assurance

Huawei iMaster NCE-T evaluates the health status of fibers and provides fault warnings through the real-time collection of optical-layer performance data, as well as big data analysis and intelligent algorithms. In addition, the platform can accurately predict sub-health risks and automatically locate fault points based on the Fiber Doctor (FD) detection and path restoration technologies, significantly improving proactive network O&M capabilities and slashing troubleshooting costs.

• Visualized health status: The optical performance over time is graphically displayed so that the fiber status can be monitored in real time.

• Proactive sub-health warning: Online fiber quality monitoring identifies potential risks and generates alarms in advance, replacing reactive repair with proactive prevention.

• Accurate fault locating: The FD technology is used to quickly locate fiber cuts, greatly shortening the service recovery time.