A Survey on Intent-Driven End-to-End 6G Mobile Communication System

With the virtualization, intelligence, and autonomous features driving the development of end-to-end (E2E) 6th-generation (6G) mobile communication systems, on-demand resilient network orchestration and configuration are becoming increasingly complicated. Meanwhile, due to human involvement, network complexity grows exponentially while its scalability remains constrained. There is an urgent need for novel networking paradigms to facilitate network management and control, particularly with service multiplicity and network dynamics. Intent-Driven Network (IDN) is essential for addressing these challenges and enhancing network scalability. Although the IDN has attracted wider research attention, there is a lack of a systematic review and comprehensive survey to clarify the basics and summarize the state of the art of IDN research status. In this survey, we investigate and provide an overview of the applications of the IDN. First, we discuss the intent-driven E2E 6G mobile communication system framework, and then introduce the key components of this framework. Second, IDN design and applications from an E2E 6G mobile communication system perspective are investigated and surveyed. Moreover, we discuss the full-life cycle management of generic IDN techniques, contributing to reducing network complexity. This survey will continue to review the research advances in other network paradigms related to IDN design and applications. Finally, we conclude this survey with open issues, challenges, and future research directions.