The heterogeneity and complexity of the ICT world highlighted in Figure 1 bring a number of challenges to network operations management. ERMINE wishes to address key issues for network management: i) the challenges of ICT economics; ii) network control and interoperability iii) automated decisions through AI.
ICT is omnipresent in our modern society, and the economy has gone beyond the industrial economy to the Internet and ICT economy. Thanks to hyper-connectivity, there are now lots of opportunities for innovation. As of May 2020, among the top-10 most valuable companies world- wide, seven are ICT companies, trusting the places from 2 to 8 (Microsoft, Apple Inc., Amazon Inc., Alphabet Inc., Facebook, Alibaba Group, Tencent). Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and cloud providers, social network actors, all services and content providers are among actors needing a business model as profitable as possible. Designing and analyzing such business models and their acceptance by end users are issues to be addressed, leading to challenges in terms of outcome for all players (who act in most cases selfishly) and in terms of benefits for society. On that last point, regulators have to determine rules that actors need to follow in order to avoid harmful behaviors and maximize social welfare. The issues we aim at addressing include: the design of economic rules for new services, the analysis of the impact of players decisions and interactions, and the potential design of rules or incentives from regulatory bodies leading to the most adequate (social) outcome. One of the frameworks to be used is that of game theory, and in particular of mechanism design. Note that we already wrote a book on the general topic of network economics, and that to our knowledge building a group on this activity is original within Inria.
There has been a metamorphosis in the last few years on the management of network opera- tions, driven by the virtualization of networks and services. This evolution allows to meet the needs in terms of the dynamic scaling of infrastructures and the agility of the decision-making, namely, a necessary prerequisite for reducing operating costs as well as improving return on investment. These developments are radically changing the way services are managed, as they become more complex (i.e., services in the form of graphs, micro-services, etc.), their expectations can be very diverse and strategies for their placement could consider a single domain or spanning across several domains, whether cooperative or not. Thus, the operation of the network becomes extremely difficult and requires not only optimization of resources but also economic considerations, espe- cially when management involves several domains. We believe that automated management and control is the key direction for an efficient solution. We intend to deal with the automation of the network by contributing to ongoing standardization efforts, notably by the “Zero touch net- work & Service Management” (ZSM) group of the ETSI, and through the elaboration of solutions based on the most recent advances in machine learning techniques, and in particular in deep re- inforcement learning. Some of the challenges we plan to tackle include dynamic placement of complex and constrained – QoS/QoE – services (i.e., network slicing), automatic service scaling, congestion control in the context of new generation networks, including IoT networks (e.g., massive Machine-Type Communications (mMTC)). Different aspects will be taken into account when developing the various solutions, including reliability, resilience, guaranteed performance (i.e., deterministic networks), but also the energy efficiency on which the viability of the latter depends. Ensuring the performance of the solutions when using machine learning techniques is, however, a major problem that is poorly addressed in the literature. We intend to address it by proposing techniques that offer at least similar performances to heuristics. Indeed, even if heuristics can be very efficient, they often have, however, some limitations. One of these is the blocking at the level of local minima. AI techniques can address this issue encountered in combinatorial problems (of the NP-hard type, such as the travelling salesman one). They sometimes yield near-optimal results. AI techniques have the additional advantage of being able to learn by interacting with the environment, and can therefore find solutions that heuristics could not.
