Artificial Intelligence for networks: understanding it through ETSI ENI use cases and architecture

Artificial Intelligence for networks: understanding it through ETSI ENI use cases and architecture

Sophia Antipolis, 20 April 2020

On 17 April, ETSI officials from the Experiential Network Intelligence group (ISG ENI) gave a webinar entitled Artificial Intelligence for networks: understanding it through ETSI ENI use cases. This webinar attracted more than 150 online attendees including operators, vendors, research institutions, and international standards development organizations.

The first speaker, Dr. Luca Pesando, TIM, Vice Chair of ETSI ENI ISG introduced the scope of the group, membership and architecture, and Dr. Yue Wang, Samsung, Secretary of the group, gave some insight about selected ENI Use Cases. They highlighted that ENI is meant to be a flexible general-purpose AI Engine able to interface with multiple types of Assisted System, by means of open interfaces and API. Assisted Systems from multiple standards body can be interfaced (e.g. 3GPP, IETF, MEF, ITU, Broadband Forum) being able to control Access, Transport, Core technologies, from infrastructure to service layer of the network operation and management, creating AI based automation loops.

This webinar is available on the Brighttalk website.

This webinar will be followed on 6 May at 5pm CEST by a second webinar entitled ETSI ENI Architecture:  AI for robust and manageable systems and applications.
You can register via the Brighttalk website.

The ETSI Industry Specification Group Experiential Network Intelligence created in February 2017 focuses on network intelligence and now comprises 60 organizations. ENI identified viable Use Cases and consequently derived the main Functionalities the ENI Engine has to provide. Five categories of Use Cases have been identified: Infrastructure Management; Network Assurance; Network Operation; Service Orchestration and Management; Network Security.

The ENI Engine aims to provide an easy way of user interaction, using a Human Like language to express the Intent of “What the User wants”, leaving the network with the task to translate it into Policies and How the Network can realize it. Evolution of the Architecture is increasing the possibility for ENI architecture to be applied to multiple Use Cases as well as increasing Security by Design. ISG ENI is working closely with the technologies defined by other ETSI groups including Fifth Generation Fixed Network (F5G), IPv6 integration (IP6), Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC), Network Function Virtualization (NFV), Secure AI (SAI) and Zero touch network and Service Management (ZSM). More information on ENI can be found on the ETSI website.