Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Hello, everyone. I'm mayday. In this issue, we explore the "intention-driven" self-intelligence network.

Before we begin, let's take a look at the story of Sun Dasheng's weapon-Ruyi Golden Hoop stick in Journey to the West.

So, here we go.

"Ruyi" Golden Hoop Wukong looked up at the thick fight, weighing 13,500 jin, and scratched his ears and scratched his cheek: if only he could be lighter and smaller.

As soon as the words were over, the artifact really became smaller and lighter. Wukong is overjoyed: lighter, smaller!

In the end, the "Poseidon Precious Iron" standing at the bottom of the sea has been turned into a "Ruyi golden hoop stick". When it is not in use, it can also be turned into an embroidery needle and put in the ear, which can be described as intention-driven and varied.

Yes, the Golden Hoop stick is like having intelligence. You can give orders to it without indicating any details. The performance of Ruyi Golden Hoop has never let Wukong down.

The meaning of "intention-driven" to the self-intelligence network is the same as that of Ruyi Golden Hoop stick to Wukong.

What can an "intention-based network" do? In the field of communication, the concept of self-intelligent network has sprung up in recent years: the network is highly autonomous and intelligent, and can be self-planning, self-deployment, self-optimization and self-evolution.

In the self-intelligent network, people only need to tell the network their intentions, the network will independently formulate the optimal plan and automatically carry out the task, and people only need the final acceptance results. This is called "intention-driven", and a network with such capabilities is naturally called "intention-based network (Intent Based Networking, IBN)".

For example, recently, there have been a lot of complaints from users in a building, reflecting the poor 5G signal and slow network speed, so it seems that it is necessary to promote the construction of indoor coverage.

So you raise your voice and issue instructions in the background of the network: I want to build a 5G room subsystem in this building, come up with a plan! After that, all you have to do is light a cigarette, swipe a video, and wait for the planning result.

At this time, the network is very busy.

It must fully consider the following questions: where is the building and how many VIP users are there? What is the traffic volume and how is it distributed between floors? It is also necessary to combine the performance-to-price ratio of various options to carry out network planning.

Sure enough, a bag of cigarettes, the report came out: it is recommended that the 4G room subsystem of the existing network be upgraded to 5G, and then supplement the digital room in some hot areas, how much new equipment is needed, how much coverage is expected after the construction is completed, and what is the capacity? everything is clear!

From the above example, we can see that with an intention-based network, everything will be so easy and labor-saving. Let's take a look at how the industry defines this concept.

Intention driven: the concept of intention, the basis of the self-intelligent network, was first introduced by IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Engineering Task Force) in the context of SDN controllers in 2015.

IETF defines intent as "an abstract high-level policy for operating a network".

This definition seems somewhat ambiguous, so IETF patched it again in 2020: "A set of operational objectives that the network should meet and the results that the network should deliver are defined declaratively without specifying how to implement or implement them."

Intention-driven essentially reflects the point of view of human beings as external supervisors of autonomous systems. They want the system to meet their needs. The system must meet their expectations and the intention is to express their needs.

If it is translated into vernacular, it is: I hope the network is like this. And I don't care about the process, I only care about the result!

The concept of "intention-based network" was put forward by Gartner in 2017.

The web based on intent is neither a product nor a market, according to Gartner's official blog. It is network software that helps to plan, design, and implement / operate the network, thereby improving network availability and agility.

The intention-based network mainly consists of the following four parts:

1. Translation and verification: the system obtains a higher level of business policy from the end user, converts it into the necessary network configuration, and generates and validates the final design and configuration to ensure correctness.

To speak human words is: what are you going to do? How? Figure it out!

two。 Automated implementation: the system can configure appropriate network changes on the existing network infrastructure through network automation or network orchestration.

To speak people's words is to move bricks, move bricks efficiently and automatically!

3. Network state awareness: the system acquires the real-time network status under its management control.

To speak human language is to evaluate how well the job is done and whether you can hand in the job.

4. Assurance and automated optimization / remediation: the system continuously verifies that the original business intent has been achieved and can take corrective action if the desired intent cannot be achieved.

What people say is: rework, repair and repair, but if it really doesn't work, you will have a showdown and start all over again.

From the above four points, we can see that intention is the starting point and foothold of all kinds of operations in the network.

According to relevant research reports, the deployment of an intention-based network can reduce the delivery time of network infrastructure by 50% and 90%, while reducing the number and duration of downtime by at least 50%, greatly improving the availability and agility of the network.

It can be seen that the industry is full of confidence in this.

As we all know, with the introduction of 5G, multi-frequency multi-standard makes the network more and more complex, a variety of toC and toB business requirements are different, a large number of different types of terminal access with different capabilities, planning and maintenance operations and other links require extremely high manpower.

If the network is operated manually, there is no doubt that the efficiency is very low, and the quality of the task to be completed largely depends on the ability and experience of the personnel, and the probability of error is very high.

On this basis, we go a step further and use pre-written and tested scripts to automate the operation, which will undoubtedly lead to a great improvement in efficiency.

But in this way, key decision points still rely on human experience, because the automation system has no idea what to do when it encounters problems and must be upgraded to get manual support.

The reason why we strive for network autonomy is to get rid of the dependence of network operation on manpower to the maximum extent. The realization of network autonomy must be intelligent enough to actively solve problems and optimize solutions according to the principle of utility maximization.

At this time, the network has become a black box, we can not take over to micro-manipulation, we do not need to figure out how to configure every parameter within the network, nor do we need to make great efforts to analyze whether the network indicators satisfy users or not. We just need to clearly express our intention to the network, and the rest will be done by the network itself.

In other words, in the self-intelligent network, intention is the natural way of interaction between people and machines, and between machines and machines, and it is also the most efficient way of interaction. The intention-based network shields the technical complexity of the underlying network, which not only allows operators to focus on the value of the network itself, but also makes the interaction between various business domains more simple.

As can be seen from the above figure, the information exchange between different domains and different layers of the self-intelligent network is all in an intention-driven way. The service operation issues orders to the resource operation through the resource intention; the business operation issues the demand to the service operation in the way of the service intention; and the end-users realize their demands by expressing the business intention to the business operation.

TM Forum: intention-driven in self-intelligent network is essentially a conceptual innovation of network governance, which is based on artificial intelligence and is the foundation of self-intelligent network.

The man-machine interface intended for input generally uses voice or text input, which first requires an important branch of traditional artificial intelligence: natural language understanding. After that, the key actions such as intelligent scheduling of network resources, fault handling of network management and network performance optimization all need the participation of big data and artificial intelligence algorithms.

In this golden age of the development of artificial intelligence, "intention" will certainly drive the self-intelligent network to shine, and let the network, like a golden hoop stick, move with "will" and empower it in all directions.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: wireless Deep Sea (ID:wuxian_shenhai), author: mayfly acquisition

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