Marc RUIZ  (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya)

Opportunities and challenges of AI-based autonomous operation in MB scenarios

Abstract
After the success of the first focused and standalone 5G trials, the beyond 5G (B5G) era already started, becoming the mainstream of academic and industry-driven research for next-generation networks. Future B5G networks must be able to operate with massive small-cell deployments and end-to-end connectivity in support of heterogeneous use cases with very different requirements in terms of bandwidth, latency and reliability. The availability of Multi-Band transmission, as well as other key technologies such as pluggable optics, will also lead to a complete redesign of the optical transport network. This also includes the control and management planes, that need to fully support autonomous network operation based on AI/ML algorithms, zero-touch networking and intent-based networking paradigms.
In this talk, we will review recent research contributions focused on AI/ML-based autonomous networking for several use cases including real time and near-real time operation. In addtion, analysis of the challenges and opportunities for future research applied to the foreseen optical transport technologies and networking paradigms will be introduced.