End-to-End Intent-Based Networking

To reap its full benefits, 5G must evolve into a scalable decentralized architecture by exploiting intelligence ubiquitously and securely across different technologies, network layers, and segments. In this article, we propose end-to-end and ubiquitous secure machine learning (ML)-powered intent-based networking (IBN). The IBN framework is aware of its state and context to autonomously take proactive actions for service assurance. It is integrated in a zero-touch control and orchestration framework featuring an ML function orchestrator to manage ML pipelines. The objective is to create an elastic and dynamic infrastructure supporting per-domain and end-to-end network and services operation. The solution is supported by a radio access network and forwarding plane, and a cloud/edge virtualization infrastructure with ML acceleration. The resulting framework supports application-level resilience and intelligence through replication and elasticity. An illustrative intelligent application use case is presented.© 2021, IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other work