INA-Infra: An Open and Extensible Infrastructure for Intent-driven Network Automation Research

As telecommunications systems progress to support diverse use cases with heterogeneous and dynamic Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, it becomes an increasingly complex task to automatically manage various resources involved — from radio, compute, to X-haul network, which are distributed from the edge to the cloud. Intent-driven network automation can play an important role in NextG networks to meet this need. Towards this, we have developed INA-Infra, an open, extensible, and end-to-end 5G/beyond 5G network infrastructure with intent-driven network automation and end-to-end network slicing capability. INA-Infra is designed using open-source components and is based on O-RAN architecture. INA-Infra manages the network infrastructure, various resources, and (virtualized / containerized) network functions using Nephio — a cloud-native intent automation solution. It also incorporates intent-driven intelligent control using a Resource Management rApp and a Network Slicing xApp. We demonstrate that INA-Infra can manage the 5G network in a highly automatic and optimized manner, allowing the mobile network operators to focus on specifying the intents of different traffic classes.