Mission-Critical Public Safety Networking: An Intent-Driven Service Orchestration Perspective

Abstract

Intent-based networking (IBN) provides a promising approach for managing networks and orchestrating services in beyond 5th Generation (B5G) deployments using modern service-based architectures. Public safety (PS) services form the basis of keeping society functional, owing to the responsiveness and avail-ability throughout the network. The provisioning of these services requires efficient and agile network management techniques with low-overhead and embedded intelligence. IBN incorporates the service subscribers in a model-driven approach to provision different user-centric services. However, it requires domain-specific and contextual processing of intents for abstracted management of network functions. This work proposes an intent definition for PS services in B5G networks, as well as a processing and orchestration architecture for a push-to-talk (PTT) use case. The simulation results show that PTT services adhere to the key performance indicators of access time and mouth-to-ear latency bounded by approximately 250 and 150 milliseconds, respectively, with an additional overhead experienced during the intent processing in the range of 20-40 milliseconds. This validates the premise of IBN in providing flexible and scalable management and service orchestration solution for PS next generation networks.