AI Sessions for Network-Exposed AI-as-a-Service

TL;DR

This paper introduces Network-Exposed AI-as-a-Service (NE-AIaaS), a framework that enables enforceable latency, mobility, and resource guarantees for cloud-based AI inference through new session primitives and protocols.

Contribution

It proposes AI Sessions (AIS) and AI Service Profiles (ASP) to provide explicit lifecycle management, resource reservation, and mobility support for AI inference services.

Findings

Design of AI Session primitives with explicit failure semantics

Protocols for resource reservation and session migration

Compatibility with existing network and edge computing standards

Abstract

Cloud-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) inference is increasingly latency- and context-sensitive, yet today's AI-as-a-Service is typically consumed as an application-chosen endpoint, leaving the network to provide only best-effort transport. This decoupling prevents enforceable tail-latency guarantees, compute-aware admission control, and continuity under mobility. This paper proposes Network-Exposed AI-as-a-Service (NE-AIaaS) built around a new service primitive: the AI Session (AIS)-a contractual object that binds model identity, execution placement, transport Quality-of-Service (QoS), and consent/charging scope into a single lifecycle with explicit failure semantics. We introduce the AI Service Profile (ASP), a compact contract that expresses task modality and measurable service objectives (e.g., time-to-first-response/token, p99 latency, success probability) alongside privacy and mobility constraints. On this basis, we specify protocol-grade procedures for (i) DISCOVER (model/site discovery), (ii) AI PAGING (context-aware selection of execution anchor), (iii) two-phase PREPARE/COMMIT that atomically co-reserves compute and QoS resources, and (iv) make-before-break MIGRATION for session continuity. The design is standard-mappable to Common API Framework (CAPIF) style northbound exposure, ETSI Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) execution substrates, 5G QoS flows for transport enforcement, and Network Data Analytics Function (NWDAF) style analytics for closed-loop paging/migration triggers.