Industry Specification Group (ISG) Zero Touch Network and Service Management (ZSM)
The pivotal deployment of 5G and network slicing has triggered the need for a radical change in the way networks and services are managed and orchestrated. Full end-to-end automation of network and service management has become an urgent necessity for delivering services with agility and speed and ensuring the economic sustainability of the very diverse set of services offered by Digital Service Providers. The ultimate automation target is to enable largely autonomous networks which will be driven by high-level policies and rules; these networks will be capable of self-configuration, self-monitoring, self-healing and self-optimization without further human intervention. All this requires a new horizontal and vertical end-to-end architecture framework designed for closed-loop automation and optimized for data-driven machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms.
Our aim is to to accelerate the definition of the required end-to-end architecture and solutions.
We study use cases and specify requirements and architecture to satisfy the requirements. We work to specify solutions and management interfaces for the orchestration and automation of the emerging end-to-end network slicing technology (GS ZSM 003) as well as of the end-to-end, cross-domain service orchestration and automation (GS ZSM 008). In addition, we work on generic enablers (GS ZSM 009-1) and solutions (GS ZSM 009-2) for closed-loop as well as on advanced topics for next generation closed-loop operations (GR ZSM 009-3).
As security is essential in the establishment of confidence in the automation process, we study security aspects (GR ZSM 010) related to the ZSM framework and solutions, and identify potential security threats and mitigation options that should be considered by the ZSM specifications to ensure that the automated processes are secured and deliver the intended business outcomes.
Latest Publications
