Intelligent network management for 5G systems: The SELFNET approach

The maintenance and management for the current Fourth Generation (4G) networks are still in a manual and semi-automatic manner, which are costly and time-consuming. This imposes a great challenge on the network management of heterogeneous, software-defined and virtualized Fifth Generation (5G) systems. With the advent of network intelligence, a possibility on intelligent management is opened for the 5G system. Without interventions of network administrators, the novel approach can autonomically deal with network failures, cyber-attacks and inefficient resource utilization, which in turn can lower operational expenditure, improve user's experience and reduce time-to-market of new services. In this paper, the reference architecture, functionality, closed-loop control, enabling algorithms of the network intelligence are presented. An intelligent 5G test-bed is set up and the experimental results verify the feasibility and effectiveness.