Beyond State Machines: Executing Network Procedures with Agentic Tool-Calling Sequences

TL;DR

This paper explores how large language models can execute network procedures via tool sequences, analyzing different approaches, their latency, correctness, and reliability limits in complex workflows.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic analysis of LLM-based network procedure execution, compares multiple approaches, and presents a new error taxonomy for failure analysis.

Findings

Approaches with encapsulated procedures reduce latency and errors.

Advanced tool-calling models maintain reliability over longer procedures.

All models show reliability degradation as procedure length increases.

Abstract

Agentic AI will be an essential enabling technology for designing future mobile communication systems, which could provide flexible and customized services, automate complex network operations, and drive autonomous decision-making across the network. This work studies how Large Language Model (LLM)-based network AI agents can be utilized to execute network procedures expressed as sequences of tool invocations. We investigate four approaches, which differ in how the agent obtains the procedure and in how execution is distributed between the agent and the underlying tools. We evaluated the latency and execution correctness across these approaches using a User Equipment (UE) IP allocation procedure as a case study. Furthermore, we conduct a stress test to examine how many sequential procedural steps an LLM agent can reliably execute before failure. Our results show that approaches relying on iterative agent-side reasoning incur higher latency and are more prone to execution errors, while approaches where the procedure is encapsulated within a single tool, which internally orchestrates the required steps by invoking other tools, reduce latency by limiting repeated reasoning. The stress-test results further show that the model with advanced tool-calling capability maintains reliable execution over longer procedures than the other evaluated models; however, all models exhibit reliability degradation as procedure length increases, revealing clear execution limits in multi-step tool-based workflows. To systematically analyze failures in procedure execution, we introduce a procedure-specific error taxonomy that categorizes deviations in multi-step procedural execution.