Intent-Driven Management for Multi-Vertical End-to-End Network Slicing Services

Moving forward from 5G to 6G, one critical open challenge is customer-driven and autonomous networks management. To enable autonomy in a large-scale, it is important to separate the customer-centric requirements from the detailed network-and resource-centric operations. Intent has been proposed as a means to abstract the expectations of services and hide the implementation details from customers. In a multi-vendor, multi-tenant, and multi-domain 6G network with end-to-end (E2E) network slicing, intents can convey requirements across different management layers to facilitate network autonomy. In this paper, we propose intent-driven management (IDM) architecture that complies with the TM Forum autonomous network framework. Different from previously defined intents, the intent is classified into three types, business intent, service intent, and resource intent, which is useful to address the high complexity caused by assuring E2E network slicing services for multiple verticals. A complex E2E use case is presented to demonstrate how the IDM architecture and principles are practically applied to enable the intent-driven autonomous management for multi-vertical and crossoperator service provision and assurance.