In the era of digital economy, 5G serves thousands of industries though its faster, richer and smarter connection. Based on the profound carrier service capability and rich operation experience of AsiaInfo Technologies (China) Limited (hereinafter referred to as: AsiaInfo Technologies), AntDB, which originated in 2008, has been successfully implemented in more than 100 projects of China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom and China Radio and Television in 24 provinces across China.

　　Mobile communications network is supported by AsiaInfo and AntDB data by providing digital services and information infrastructures for over one billion mobile phone users to conduct core transactions, such as daily calls, transaction billing, Internet traffic, etc. In 2021, with the smooth cutover and continuous stable and efficient operation of the accounting database of a provincial company of China Mobile Communications Group, China Mobile's first independent and controllable core accounting database was born. It also marks the successful completion of the "last mile" of end-to-end localization replacement in telecom industry.

　　AntDB, a witness to 20 years of changes in the telecom industry

　　In 2000, two telecom companies, China Mobile and China Unicom, were officially established, indicating the construction climax of 2G network in our contry. This period saw the emergence of the legendary "national" popular phone, Xiaolingtong. With more than 100 million users, the volume of text messages sent by Chinese people exceeded one billion per day.

　　Database, a data management system, like a digitalized file cabinet, is a cornerstone of storing, organizing and managing all kinds of information system. However, such an important software that is vital to data was monopolized by foreign products for a long time.

　　When the the battle of 3G communications standard was kicked off,China refused to be left behind and participated actively in international standardization affairs. China Mobile and other operators shouldered the duty to make 3G commercial. At the same time, the demand of developing our own operation systems, chips and database was getting increasingly urgent day by day.

　　Facing the pressure of mobile Internet, operators set off to build the core of new generation of communication networks in terms of billing and other critical transaction systems. It was a process waiting to be empirically proved,not an either-or certainty, that whether high-tech innovation is guided by leading scholars into the industry or innovative research from industry itself.

　　As a leading provider of software products, solutions and services, AsiaInfo fully support the information transformation of BOSS system(Business Support Systems for Operators) of China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom, undertaking new infrastructure construction of enormous key transactions,namely bill processing, billing and accounting,customer relationship management,etc.

　　In 2008, amid emergent situation, AntDB team shouldered the duty that a series of optimization and design targeting the processing performance and storage mechanism of billing system needed to be done in the times when domestic database was just about to start, and developed AndDB on its own. That is the origin of AntDB.

　　Immense data processing to commercial core of 5G billing

　　In 2010, the proportion of mobile phone users had reached 74.5%, three times the number of fixed-line phone users, and the amount of phone Internet users was 303 million, according to statistics. People realized that when data service had become the major direction of the development of mobile communication, 3Gcould not meet the need of Internet speed.

　　In the age of 4G, with faster Internet speed and cheaper Internet fee, mobile phones were equipped  with more applications and functions. The billing system’s bill volume was growing geometrically, asking for increasingly higher demand for simultaneous improvement of billing system performance. Gathering at an unbelievably speed, the seas of information brought three challenges to billing system: data access speed, concurrent access difficulty and system reliability.

　　The reason why AntDB is able to efficiently cope with tremendous transaction data of telecom industry and speed up the increment of data value of enterprises’ core transaction is the following three improved system capabilities:

　　First, it can quickly handle enormous data. AntDB in-memory database, different from traditional disk-based database system, can skip the disk and access to data directly, which enables 10-10000 times higher access speed.

　　Second, the OLTP services (Online Transaction Process) based on digitalized scenarios, such as online service, customer management, billing query, etc.,demand higher concurrent access capability of database. For that reason, AntDB is endowed with distributed elastic scalability.With a linear scalability ratio close to 1, it can achieve PB-level data management on ordinary PCs without sacrificing stand-alone performance.

　　After that,though continuous technical innovation and R&D investment, AntDB evolved from business-based recovery to standard transaction-based recovery in terms of high availability and security, introduced disk persistence and transaction capability, and supported complete distributed transaction ACID features;its core gradually outgrew pure memory structure,becoming a independent data management system.

　　After 14 years of trials and tribulations, AntDB has evolved into a domestic distributed database with high performance and availability based on original distributed structure, supporting operators’ core transaction, CRM and other business system in over 20 provinces across the country, which has been highly evaluated and recognized by customers;it is also widely applied in finance, postal service, transportation, energy and other industries.

　　Figure 1: massive business applications of AntDB in communications, finance, postal service,transportation and other industries.

　　Why choose AntDB for domestic adaptation?

　　The awareness of “domestic replacement” started to rise in 2011. As the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released the policy of independent and controllable technology and security trust, the three telecom giants embarked on their own exploration of independent and controllable course. A provincial customer of China Mobile served by AntDB first removed the small machine of CRM system and replaced it with X86 and virtual machine, meanwhile, it started to upgrade the application development framework and introduced AntDB to realize the parallelism and replacement of the original database.

　　It is understood that the independent and controllable database set possessed by China Mobile accounts for over 50% in one province by the end of 2021, gaining significant effects. AntDB ensures continuous and stable operation of  telecom core transaction system with 0 failure for nearly ten years.

　　The new generation of billing generally adopts a new IT architecture of "platform + application", which disassembles the business support system into a series of highly cohesive and low-coupling business centers, and uses message middleware for bill flow between application links, and the application remotely accesses the information stored in distributed AntDB through cross-host.

　　AntDB can store the data of hot-read applications such as real-time offer access in the locally deployed cache for pre-loading customer information and reducing the number of remote accesses to the database; while the data of cold-read applications such as bills, batch prices and historical information, which account for nearly 80% of the data, fall to disk for long-term storage, ensuring that none of the data is lost.

　　In order to interface with diverse kinds of business systems more conveniently, AntDB supports SQL 2016 Standard,embodied with multiple general-purpose syntax ecology of open resource database and highly compatible with Oracle,which allows users to keep their original usage habits when using AntDB.

　　For the purpose of digitalization of large enterprises, we need to take into consideration not only the improvement of the performance, but also the availabilities of database and application, in order to implement it successfully. AntDB helps get business online and available quickly though smart data analysis appraisal and one-click migration solution, boosting the wide application and popularization of domestic database in an efficient way.

　　In the evaluation for 13th batch of big data products organized by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (abbreviated as "CICT") , AntDB product, with its high testing score and outstanding performance, passed both “Basic Capability Evaluation for Distributed Transactional Database”and “Performance Evaluation for Distributed Transactional Database”at the same time, actively promoting the exploration and application the new technology of database in information innovation field.

　　Adhering to the original aspiration, “Make data generate value faster”, it is AntDB’s mission to complete the digital transformation of large enterprises, leading its way in the times of domestication.

　　An application case of China Mobile’s 5G billing core  replacement by AntDB

　　In 2021, with the smooth cutover and continuously stable and efficient operation of the accounting database of a provincial company of China Mobile Communications Group, China Mobile's first independent and controllable core accounting database was born. It also marks the successful completion of the "last mile" of end-to-end localization replacement in telecom industry.

　　The accounting database is the core of the business support system of communication operators as it is responsible for data synchronization, top-up payment and billing records  of hundreds of millions of subscriber. With the large-scale implementation of 5G services, the billing system has increasingly high requirements for the database's  guaranteed capability of high availability under  high concurrency.

　　AntDB has carried out domestic alternative solution with functions of smart appraisal and one-click migration concerning the features and business difficulties of client accounting system. On the day the system went online, it supported business acceptance nearly 100 million times and business changes millions of times; in the case that the system interface time consumption was nearly the same as before the cutover, the number of single node connections could be improved by about 20 times; since the cutover, the accounting system had 0 failures and 0 complaints from users.

　　Besides, as a core accounting system, the stability and reliability of the database is the most important, and any small defect may cause irreparable loss to the enterprise. After 14 years of trials and tribulations in the production environment of operators, AntDB has fully proved its security and reliability. Apart from that, the multi-location and multi-copy employment solution provided by AntDB supports second-level disaster-tolerant emergency switch of primary and backup resources and other features, which extra guarantees data security.

　　In telecom industry, the core accounting system in many provinces used to operating on Oracle and other foreign database products. The syntax compatibility and diverse migration ecology tools of AntDB reduce much functional transformation and availability work and ensure smooth migration through multiple links such as security assessment, functional testing and emergency plan. Thanks to the concerted cooperation of all skilled and capable personnels, the project realized stable replacement from original database to AntDB after verified by thousands of test cases and nearly 10000 interface joint commissioning tests.

　　According to a relevent person of China Mobile in one province, AntDB perfectly meets the “telecom-level”business requirement and improves their business security significantly,which underpins the large-scale expansion of 5G business in China to a large degree.

　　About Us

　　As the carrier of national information technology application and innovation (information and innovation), Asiainfo Anhui Technologies has been focusing on the research and development of database and middleware products and services in the field of basic software since its establishment in 2019.

　　Relying on years of technical accumulation and combining with the communication industry reality, we have formed mature and technologically advanced database product AntDB. AntDB is widely applied in communications industry and has over 200 clients in other industries, like finance, postal service,transportation and energy.AntDB actively participated in the localization transformation and construction of the core transaction system database of the communication industry, and completed the successful delivery of major projects such as the customer center of a province of China Mobile, the accounting system of a province of China Mobile, and the billing system of a certain center in 2021, which fully verified the maturity of the products.