Extending Intent-Powered Network Management with LMs in B5G Infrastructures

Due to their manual, error-prone, and resourceintensive nature, traditional network management methods become unfeasible for highly dynamic, complex, and heterogeneous Beyond 5G (B5G) systems. In this landscape, Intent-Based Networking (IBN) emerges as a promising solution that automates the service lifecycle while offering flexibility and scalability. Nevertheless, IBN faces challenges in expressing, interpreting, and refining high-level intents across diverse Use Cases (UCs). This work proposes a Language Model Intent-based Application Programming Interface (LM-IbAPI) for enhanced dynamic network management in B5G infrastructures to address these challenges. In the framework of the 6GDIFERENTE project, our solution is seamlessly integrated with the management layer to translate multiple intents from diverse UCs into precise network actions with accuracy and reduced time response. We employed Ollama as a unified framework to quickly and effectively test several language models. The results demonstrated that mistral_7B achieved the best trade-off between processing time and accuracy, being capable of generalising across varying numbers of users, services, operators, and South-bound Interfaces (SBIs).