Towards Autonomic Mobile Network Operators

Abstract

The vision of future fifth generation networks includes an entire ecosystem mainly composed by several different access technologies, virtualization and cloud/edge computing paradigms. Side by side, it also includes full deployment of machine learning for proactive network management and diagnosis. All those elements of such a complex system are used to host the huge variety of verticals the mobile network will have to support. These premises have enforced the idea that fifth generation will be the last one, while future modifications will just represent software/hardware upgrades of that complex ecosystem. This article envisions the realisation of autonomic mobile network operators as the main element, which will significantly change the intrinsic nature of networks, network operators and humans' role in mobile networks, to establish the actual change to a future generation. After presenting architecture and logical-functional structure of such autonomic operators, the paper shows a possible effective model of that future generation as autonomic multi-agent multi-layer system.