Intent-driven networks are an essential stepping stone in the evolution of network and service management towards a truly autonomous paradigm. User centric intents provide an abstracted means of impacting the design, provisioning, deployment and assurance of network infrastructure and services with the help of service level agreements and minimum network capability exposure. The concept of Intent Based Networking (IBN) poses several challenges in terms of the contextual definition of intents, role of different stakeholders, and a generalized architecture. In this review, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the state-of-the-art in IBN including the intent description models, intent lifecycle management, significance of IBN and a generalized architectural framework along with challenges and prospects for IBN in future cellular networks. An analytical study is performed on the data collected from relevant studies primarily focusing on the inter-working of IBN with softwarized networking based on NFV/SDN infrastructures. Critical functions required in the IBN management and service model design are explored with different abstract modeling techniques and a converged architectural framework is proposed. The key findings include: (1) benefits and role of IBN in autonomous networking, (2) improvements needed to integrate intents as fundamental policies for service modeling and network management, (3) need for appropriate representation models for intents in domain agnostic abstract manner, and (4) need to include learning as a fundamental function in autonomous networks. These observations provide the basis for in-depth investigation and standardization efforts for IBN as a fundamental network management paradigm in beyond 5G cellular networks.
5G technology complements the enabling of communication services for different vertical industries such as smart distribution grids. Automation is an integral and necessary part of the power distribution grid operation and management. This paper postulates a framework by which the smart distribution grid can obtain service-oriented communication services using 5G network slicing and intent-based networking (IBN). IBN provides an interface to service users and network stakeholders to cooperate through a high level abstraction model of service provisioning in a network agnostic manner. The autom…
ORION: Intent-Aware Orchestration in Open RAN for SLA-Driven Network Management
National Telecommunications Institute (INATEL)（国家电信研究所）；University of Vale do Rio dos Sinos (UNISINOS)（里奥多斯西诺斯谷大学）；Federal Technological University of Paraná (UFTPR)（巴拉那联邦技术大学）
The use cases of the upcoming 5G mobile networks introduce new and complex user demands that will require support for fast reconfiguration of network resources. Software Defined Network (SDN) is a key technology that can address these requirements, as it decouples the control plane from the data plane of the network devices and logically centralizes the control plane in the SDN controller. SDN network operating system (ONOS) is a state-of-art SDN controller that aims to address this important scalability limitation from its design. An important feature of ONOS is that it allows network adminis…
Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication is crucial in developing Internet of Things (IoT). As it is well known that cellular networks have been considered as the primary infrastructure for M2M communications, there are several key issues to be addressed in order to deploy M2M communications over cellular networks. Notably, the rapid growth of M2M traffic dramatically increases energy consumption, as well as degrades the performance of existing Human-to-Human (H2H) traffic. Sustainable operation technology and resource management are efficacious ways for solving these issues. In this paper, we i…
With the commercial launch of 5G technologies and fast pace of expansion of cellular network infrastructure, it is expected that cellular and mobile networks traffic will exponentially increase. In addition, new services are expected to spread widely, such as the Internet of Things connected to mobile networks. This will add additional burden in terms of traffic load. As a result, some studies suggest that mobile traffic may increase more than 1000 times compared to the amount of traffic that is generated nowadays. This means that network resources for mobile services must be managed and contr…
Intent-based networking (IBN) solutions to managing complex ICT systems have become one of the key enablers of intelligent and autonomous network management. As the number of machine learning (ML) techniques deployed in IBN increases, it becomes increasingly important to understand their expected performance. Whereas IBN concepts are generally specific to the use case envisioned, the underlying platforms are generally heterogenous, comprised of complex processing units, including CPU/GPU, CPU/FPGA and CPU/TPU combinations, which needs to be considered when running the ML techniques chosen. We …
The evolution towards Industry 4.0 is driving the need for innovative solutions in the area of network management, considering the complex, dynamic and heterogeneous nature of ICT supply chains. To this end, Intent-Based networking (IBN) which is already proven to evolve how network management is driven today, can be implemented as a solution to facilitate the management of large ICT supply chains. In this paper, we first present a comparison of the main architectural components of typical IBN systems and, then, we study the key engineering requirements when integrating IBN with ICT supply cha…
Intent-based networking (IBN) provides a promising approach for managing networks and orchestrating services in beyond 5G (B5G) deployments using modern service-based architectures. Public safety (PS) services form the basis of keeping society functional, owing to the responsiveness and availability throughout the network. The provisioning of these services requires efficient and agile network management techniques with low-overhead and embedded intelligence. IBN incorporates the service subscribers in a model-driven approach to provision different user-centric services. However, it requires d…
Modular Multi-Domain Digital Twin Architecture: Sustainable Intent-Driven 6G Management
University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland（西部瑞士应用科学与艺术大学）；Technische Universität Berlin（柏林工业大学）；Poznań University of Technology（波兹南理工大学）；Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica（荷兰数学与计算机科学研究中心）；Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚电信技术中心）；Telefónica Innovación Digital（西班牙电信数字创新）；Ceragon Networks（萨瑞昂网络）
Internet provides a growing variety of social data sources: calendars, event aggregators, social networks, browsers, etc. Also, the mechanisms to gather information from these sources, such as web services, semantic web and big data techniques have become more accessible and efficient. This allows a detailed prediction of the main expected events and their associated crowds. Due to the increasing requirements for service provision, particularly in urban areas, having information on those events would be extremely useful for Operations, Administration and Maintenance (OAM) tasks, since the soci…
The exponential rise in mobile traffic originating from mobile devices highlights the need for making mobility management in future networks even more efficient and seamless than ever before. Ultra-Dense Cellular Network vision consisting of cells of varying sizes with conventional and mmWave bands is being perceived as the panacea for the eminent capacity crunch. However, mobility challenges in an ultra-dense heterogeneous network with motley of high frequency and mmWave band cells will be unprecedented due to plurality of handover instances, and the resulting signaling overhead and data inte…
With the human friendly declarative intent policy expression, intent-driven network can make network management and configuration autonomous without human intervention. However, the availability and dependability of these refined policies from the expressed intents should be well ensured by full-life cycle verification. Moreover, intent-driven network verification is still in its initial stage, and there is a lack of full-life cycle end-to-end verification framework. As a result, in this article, we present and review existing verification techniques, and classify them according to objective, …
Chat-Driven Optimal Management for Virtual Network Services
Department of Applied Physics and Physico-Informatics, Keio University（应用物理与物理信息学系，庆应大学）；Network Service Laboratories, NTT, Inc.（网络服务实验室，NTT公司）；IOWN Product Design Center, NTT, Inc.（IOWN产品设计中心，NTT公司）
