Intent Profiling and Translation Through Emergent Communication

Abstract: To effectively express and satisfy network application requirements, intent-based network management has emerged as a promising solution. In intent-based methods, users and applications express their intent in a high-level abstract language to the network. Although this abstraction simplifies network operation, it induces many challenges to efficiently express applications' intents and map them to different network capabilities. Therefore, in this work, we propose an AI-based framework for intent profiling and translation. We consider a scenario where applications interacting with the network express their needs for network services in their domain language. The machine-to-machine communication (i.e., between applications and the network) is complex since it requires networks to learn how to understand the domain languages of each application, which is neither practical nor scalable. Instead, a framework based on emergent communication is proposed for intent profiling, in which applications express their abstract quality-of-experience (QoE) intents to the network through emergent communication messages. Subsequently, the network learns how to interpret these communication messages and map them to network capabilities (i.e., slices) to guarantee the requested Quality-of-Service (QoS). Simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms self-learning slicing and other baselines, and achieves a performance close to the perfect knowledge baseline.