Network Slice Provisioning Taking Into Account Tenant Intents and Operator Policies

Intent-based networking paradigm aims at easing the complexity of network management for operators/tenants. Intents are expressed as high-level requirements in terms of what is required and not how to achieve it with low level deployment and infrastructure details. A translation between what is required and how to achieve it is therefore needed. In the context of network automation, this translation and subsequent network management tasks must be performed automatically. Most of the work in this area has been focusing on the runtime phases. This paper is interested in the network slice design phase and proposes an approach for determining all the network slice solutions from tenant intents while taking into account operator policies. Therefore, these solutions will satisfy the tenant intents and comply automatically with the operator policies. Tenant intents consist of one or multiple required communication services and network slices along with their desired QoS characteristics. The operator’s policies specify the supported slice types with their QoS characteristics. This is the first step towards an automated approach for network slices design from tenant intents. The proposed approach is model based.