The paper “Intent-Driven Management for Multi-Vertical End-to-End Network Slicing Services” by Min Xie (Telenor Research & Telenor Group, Norway); Pedro Henrique Gomes (Ericsson Research, Brazil); Jörg Niemöller (Ericsson, Sweden); Patrick Waldemar (Telenor ASA, Norway) with acknowledge to the TeraFlow project was accepted on the 3rd Workshop on Network Management for 6G Communication Systems (NETMAN6G) within the framework of IEEE Global Communications Conference (IEEE GLOBECOM) that took place on 4–8 December 2022 on Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
The paper was presented on session “Massive Mimo/Network Slicing” on Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 13:00-14:30 BRT (GMT-3) The event was hybrid, but this session was in person (Windsor Convention & Expo Center, Room: Oceania II)
In this paper, the authors proposed an intent-driven management (IDM) architecture that complies with the TM Forum autonomous network framework. Moving forward from 5G to 6G, one critical open challenge is customer-driven and autonomous networks management. To enable autonomy in a large-scale, it is important to separate the customer-centric requirements from the detailed network- and resource-centric operations. Intent has been proposed as a means to abstract the expectations of services and hide the implementation details from customers. In a multi-vendor, multi-tenant, and multi-domain 6G network with end-to-end (E2E) network slicing, intents can convey requirements across different management layers to facilitate network autonomy.
Different from previously defined intents, this one is classified into three types: business intent, service intent and resource intent, which is useful to address the high complexity caused by assuring E2E network slicing services for multiple verticals. A complex E2E use case was presented to demonstrate how the IDM architecture and principles are practically applied to enable the intent-driven autonomous management for multi-vertical and cross-operator service provision and assurance.