Session Date/Time: 29 Mar 2023 06:30

nmrg

Summary

This meeting focused on updates and discussions surrounding several key research areas within the Network Management Research Group (NMRG): Artificial Intelligence (AI) for network management, Network Digital Twins, and Green Networking. There were presentations covering challenges in AI deployment, network data quality, data fabrics, functional design aspects of performance-oriented digital twins, and ongoing activities in Green Networking.

Key Discussion Points

AI Challenges Draft: The new research group document draft-nmrg-ai-challenges-00 was discussed, including feedback from the call for adoption. Key points included clarifying the distinction between AI and ML, addressing characterization criteria, discussing the coupling between AI and network management planes, and the relationship between intent-based management and digital twins.
Distributed AI Services: Considerations for deploying AI services in a distributed approach were presented, focusing on the deployment of AI inference services and hardware considerations.
Network Data Quality: A presentation highlighted the network data quality problem and a proposed method called permutation testing for quality assessment. Concerns were raised regarding the method's reliance on direct correlations between X and Y and potential impacts of data dimensionality.
Network Data Fabric: An approach to building a data fabric for network management using the NGSI-LD model was introduced, aiming for better integration of data sources and collaboration between sources and consumers.
Performance-Oriented Digital Twins: Discussions centered around functional design aspects of performance-oriented digital twins, particularly in optical networks. The management of concurrent datasets, variability in networks, and model composition were emphasized.
Green Networking: An update on the challenges and opportunities in green networking was provided, including a proposal to bring the green metrics draft to the OPSAWG.

Decisions and Action Items

draft-nmrg-ai-challenges-00: The document will be changed to draft-nmrg-ai-challenges-00. The authors will proceed with that. And also instruct the authors to provide a new revision. Will address the different comments and suggestion received during the the file option.
Dedicated Discussion on IB Use Cases: A dedicated meeting will be scheduled to address the use cases aspects of Intent-Based Networking (IBN) in NMRG. The date and time of the meeting will be announced on the mailing list.
Research Group Topics: The NMRG will collectively define the value contribution and desired research outcomes for AI in network management, Network Digital Twins, and Green Networking.
Green Metrics Draft: The proposal is to bring the green metrics graph to W G.

Next Steps

The research group will follow up with dedicated meetings and mailing list discussions to refine research questions and goals for the major topic areas.
Offers and interested parties were encouraged to contribute to the drafts.