With the rise of digital households and the continuous development of FTTR (Fiber to the Room) networking solutions, various telecommunications standard organizations have successively issued FTTR-related standards this year, marking the gradual maturity of the FTTR industry. Among them, the C-WAN (Centralized Wi-Fi Area Network) architecture of FTTR has gained attention from major standard organizations.

In traditional home networking, there is a lack of effective coordination between master and slave network devices, leading to Wi-Fi resource conflicts between various network devices and access terminals, resulting in degraded overall network performance and difficulty in meeting the bandwidth and concurrency requirements of applications such as 8K ultra-high-definition videos and home cloud NAS. The C-WAN architecture of FTTR can define new physical, link, and data layer interactions based on the characteristics of home networks, supporting seamless roaming of terminals, Wi-Fi power balancing, interference optimization, and other functions through the collaboration of optical and Wi-Fi. The core of the C-WAN architecture is the centralized control of optical and Wi-Fi transmission by the main device for information collection and decision-making, achieving unified coordination and configuration of optical and air interface resources, significantly reducing conflicts, enhancing overall network performance, and meeting the requirements of Level 2 and above defined in the Broadband Development Alliance's "Home Broadband Service Experience Grading White Paper."

The FTTR network with the C-WAN architecture has four main characteristics:

- Ordered Transmission Over the Air: The C-WAN architecture can schedule the air transmission resources (time, frequency, space, etc.) of master and slave devices in real time according to the service priority, eliminating air conflicts.
- Seamless Roaming: The C-WAN architecture centrally manages and controls air connection states and data forwarding paths, enabling centralized management and control, and decision-making for direct switching.
- Self-Intelligent Link Assurance: The C-WAN architecture can identify service experience demands based on service perception, and allocate resources based on real-time network status and panoramic resource views to ensure user experience.
- Centralized Control of Forwarding: The C-WAN architecture integrates the data forwarding capability of slave devices into the main device for centralized control, simplifying the functionality of slave devices, reducing overall complexity, and increasing deployment flexibility.

Since 2023, major domestic and international telecommunications standard organizations have issued standards for the C-WAN architecture: in April 2023, the International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) completed the standardization of the FTTR architecture; in May 2023, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) released the E2E architecture standard for FTTR; in July 2023, the China Communications Standards Association (CCSA) completed the public release of the FTTR architecture. These architecture standards are all based on the C-WAN architecture, indicating that the C-WAN architecture is the foundation of FTTR.

At the recent Shenzhen International Optoelectronics Exposition, the Broadband Development Alliance released the "Home Broadband Multi-Service Concurrent Experience Grading White Paper" (hereinafter referred to as the "White Paper"), supplementing the previously released "Home Broadband Service Experience Grading White Paper." The "White Paper" proposes typical multi-service concurrent models for home broadband services, and puts forward three sub-levels of L2-1, L2-2, and L2-3 for home broadband multi-service concurrent experience grading, summarizing the corresponding home network carrying capacity requirements for each sub-level. It can be seen that home broadband networks are gradually transitioning to experience-oriented operation, and high-quality network experience will become an important support for brand building and competitiveness. As the only FTTR product on the market that adopts the C-WAN architecture, Huawei's FTTR Starlight F30 can meet the L2-1 experience requirements of the "White Paper."

With the rapid development of new digital home services, the continuous improvement of network experience has become a new demand for home network construction, and the establishment and maturity of C-WAN standards also indicate the development direction of future FTTR networking solutions. FTTR based on the C-WAN architecture is the development trend of future home networking, providing a full-fiber network foundation for new applications in digital homes and achieving interconnection.