Intent-based management will play a critical role in achieving customers' expectations in the next-generation mobile networks. Traditional methods cannot perform efficient resource management since they tend to handle each expectation independently. Existing approaches, e.g., based on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) allocate resources in an efficient fashion when there are conflicting expectations on the network slice. However, in reality, systems are often far more complex to be addressed by a standalone MARL formulation. Often there exists a hierarchical structure of intent fulfillment where multiple pre-trained, self-interested agents may need to be further orchestrated by a supervisor or controller agent. Such agents may arrive in the system adhoc, which then needs to be orchestrated along with other available agents. This is especially true for networks evolving with time as components can get added incrementally. Retraining the whole system every time is often infeasible given the associated time and cost. Given the challenges, such adhoc coordination of pre-trained systems could be achieved through an intelligent supervisor agent which incentivizes pre-trained RL/MARL agents through sets of dynamic contracts (goals or bonuses) and encourages them to act as a cohesive unit towards fulfilling a global expectation. Some approaches use a rule-based supervisor agent and deploy the hierarchical constituent agents sequentially, based on human-coded rules. In the current work, we propose a framework whereby pre-trained agents can be orchestrated in parallel leveraging an AI-based supervisor agent. For this, we propose to use Adhoc-Teaming approaches which assign optimal goals to the MARL agents and incentivize them to exhibit certain desired behaviours. Results on the network emulator show that the proposed approach results in faster and improved fulfilment of expectations when compared to rule-based approaches and even generalizes to changes in environments.

Autonomous management of multiple services is a crucial requirement of 6G networks. In recent years, researchers have been working on using artificial intelligence(AI) to orchestrate intents, autonomously, through Intent Management Functions (IMFs). These IMFs can handle conflicting service intents and prioritize the global objective based on predefined utility function and intent priorities. However, for such frameworks to be successful in real-life scenarios, they must be flexible to business situations. Service priorities can change, and the utility function that measures the fulfillment of objectives may also vary in definition. This paper proposes a novel method that enables the IMF to adapt to unseen forms of utility functions and changes in service priorities at run-time without requiring additional training. We assume the IMF contains agents trained using multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to perform actions and multiple such MARL systems are orchestrated by Ad-hoc teaming approaches. Results on a network emulator demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods that require additional training to achieve the same flexibility, thereby saving costs and increasing adaptability.

The dynamic and evolutionary nature of service requirements in wireless networks has motivated the telecom industry to consider intelligent self-adapting Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents for controlling the growing portfolio of network services. Infusion of many new types of services is anticipated with future adoption of 6G networks, and sometimes these services will be defined by applications that are external to the network. An RL agent trained for managing the needs of a specific service type may not be ideal for managing a different service type without domain adaptation. We provide a simple heuristic for evaluating a measure of proximity between a new service and existing services, and show that the RL agent of the most proximal service rapidly adapts to the new service type through a well defined process of domain adaptation. Our approach enables a trained source policy to adapt to new situations with changed dynamics without retraining a new policy, thereby achieving significant computing and cost-effectiveness. Such domain adaptation techniques may soon provide a foundation for more generalized RL-based service management under the face of rapidly evolving service types.

Recently, intent-based management is receiving good attention in telecom networks owing to stringent performance requirements for many of the use cases. Several approaches on the literature employ traditional methods in the telecom domain to fulfill intents on the KPIs, which can be defined as a closed loop. However, these methods consider every closed-loop independent of each other which degrades the combined closed-loop performance. Also, when many closed loops are needed, these methods are not easily scalable. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) techniques have shown significant promise in many areas in which traditional closed-loop control falls short, typically for complex coordination and conflict management among loops. In this work, we propose a method based on MARL to achieve intent-based management without the requirement of the model of the underlying system. Moreover, when there are conflicting intents, the MARL agents can implicitly incentivize the loops to cooperate, without human interaction, by prioritizing the important KPIs. Experiments have been performed on a network emulator on optimizing KPIs for three services and we observe the proposed system performs well and is able to fulfill all existing intents when there are enough resources or prioritize the KPIs when there are scarce resources.