Enabling Data Analytics and Machine Learning for 5G Services within Disaggregated Multi-Layer Transport Networks

Recent advances, related to the concepts of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) and with applications across multiple technology domains, have gathered significant attention due, in particular, to the overall performance improvement of such automated systems when compared to methods relying on human operation. Consequently, using AI/ML for managing, operating and optimizing transport networks is increasingly seen as a potential opportunity targeting, notably, large and complex environments. Such AI-assisted automated network operation is expected to facilitate innovation in multiple aspects related to the control and management of future optical networks and is a promising milestone in the evolution towards autonomous networks, where networks self-adjust parameters such as transceiver configuration. To accomplish this goal, current network control, management and orchestration systems need to enable the application of AI/ML techniques. It is arguable that Software-Defined Networking (SDN) principles, favouring centralized control deployments, featured application programming interfaces and the development of a related application ecosystem are well positioned to facilitate the progressive introduction of such techniques, starting, notably, in allowing efficient and massive monitoring and data collection. In this paper, we present the control, orchestration and management architecture designed to allow the automatic deployment of 5G services (such as ETSI NFV network services) across metropolitan networks, conceived to interface 5G access networks with elastic core optical networks at multi Tb/s. This network segment, referred to as Metro-haul, is composed of infrastructure nodes that encompass networking, storage and processing resources, which are in turn interconnected by open and disaggregated optical networks. In particular, we detail subsystems like the Monitoring and Data Analytics or the in-operation planning backend that extend current SDN based network control to account for new use cases.