From Orchestration Towards Automation

Autonomous network proposes to optimize user experience, automate management operations, and maximize resource efficiency by simplifying network architecture, encapsulating autonomous domains, and providing closed loops for business/network operation control, and clarifies the target architecture and implementation path for network intelligence.

The autonomous network puts forward two dimensions of space and time requirements for the network management system of telecom operators:

On the one hand, the hierarchical, domain, and closed-loop autonomous architecture and cross-layer business-driven interaction of autonomous driving networks require operator network management systems to achieve functional enhancements ("addition") and interface simplification ("subtraction") in the spatial dimension.

On the other hand, the introduction of AI technology in autonomous driving networks and the complexity of network management itself require operators to achieve continuous iteration and gradual improvement in the time dimension of their network management system ("spiral upward").

In this speech, we will share China Mobile's autonomous network goals, approach, related practice, and overall thinking about the obstacles we are facing and proposed way forward, especially from the perspective of industrial collaboration, and the progress and next steps of ETSI NFV related work.

In particular, as an essential part of network management plane, MANO will need to be enhanced not only with simplified intent/policy interfaces, but also providing basis for enabling a complete zero-touch close loop (including VNF configuration), as well as the DevOps mechanism for AI models and/or analytics microservices embedded with network elements

Speakers

Lingli Deng

Technical Manager, Senior Researcher, Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Operation Center, China Mobile Research Institute

Biography 

Deng Lingli, joined China Mobile Research Institute in 2009, and has successively engaged in distributed network architecture, intelligent pipe, next-generation network architecture and network intelligence projects in the company. Currently, she is the head of the industrial operation lab of the artificial intelligence and intelligent operation center, and organizes related efforts on standard development, open source implementation and other industrial collaboration enablement for network automation.