Intent-driven autonomous network and service management in future cellular networks: A structured literature review

TL;DR

This paper reviews the current state of intent-based networking (IBN) in future cellular networks, analyzing its models, architecture, challenges, and potential for enabling autonomous network management.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of IBN, proposes a generalized architectural framework, and identifies key challenges and future research directions for autonomous cellular networks.

Findings

IBN enhances autonomous network capabilities in future cellular systems.

Integration of intent policies requires improved representation models.

Learning should be incorporated as a core function in autonomous networks.

Abstract

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.