A Capability Broker for Workflow-Network QoS Coordination in B5G/6G Industrial Services

Abstract: Industrial services in beyond-fifth-generation (B5G) and sixth-generation (6G) networks are increasingly executed as multi-phase workflows whose quality-of-service (QoS) demands change across ordered phases. Existing exposure, analytics, and policy-control functions can provide capability information and enforce QoS treatment, but they do not track the admitted QoS agreement between a workflow and the network. This paper studies this missing coordination function in the software control plane. We propose a Capability Broker that represents each admitted trajectory as a lifecycle-managed QoS commitment, including the workflow demand, network capability, validity time, and enforcement state. The Broker operates above existing exposure and policy-control interfaces and enforces capability freshness, duplicate-safe admission, legal state transitions, per-commitment event ordering, recovery routing, and Broker--network state consistency. Prototype results with microbenchmarks, fault injection, ablation, and controlled message loss show that the full Broker preserves commitment consistency with microsecond-level local processing overhead, while removing individual Broker functions exposes duplicate commitments, stale admissions, illegal transitions, lost-update divergences, or Broker-network inconsistency.