Intent-Driven Network

With softwarezation, virtualization, intelligence, autonomous, and terrestrial-satellite collaborative features of the next-generation network development, on-demand resilient network management, orchestration and configurations have been becoming increasingly complicated. There is an urgent need for novel networking paradigms to facilitate the network management and control, in particular, with service multiplicity, network dynamics, and heavy human involvement. Intent-Driven Network (IDN) or Intent-Based Network have attracted wider research attention from standardization, industry and academia, such as 3GPP, TMF, and IETF, Google Nephio, FutureWei Autonomous Driving Network, and Cisco AI4Net, and so on. Although various organizations have focused on the IDN techniques and applications, there lacks a handbook to systematically review and comprehensively survey the key techniques, applications, and challenges. This book will generically provide the audiences the key techniques and various applications, which will guide the audiences to deploy their own specific IDN applications.

In this book, we clarify the concept, representation, refinement, policy generation, verification of the intent, and summarize the key architectures, models, techniques to deploy a full lifecycle intent fulfilment and intent assurance for intent-driven network management and orchestration, in particular, from artificial intelligence and large language model perspectives. Furthermore, we survey more applications to various networking scenarios and use cases in detail in the fields of the software-defined network, the mobile 6G networks, the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial IoT, the unmanned aerial vehicle networks, and the future Internet, and so on. This book can help make a comprehensive understanding and guidance for the IDN.

The audiences will be graduated students and researcher at university and research institute, network operators or device providers, and a worldwide people from standardization, industry and academia organizations. The audiences may be with the basics and background of network communication principles and protocols, and will be better with network management and artificial intelligence.