Optimizing Throughput and Energy with Intent-Based 6G Network Slicing: Conflict Handling

The advent of Sixth-Generation (6G) mobile networks is expected to facilitate new services, each with diverse Quality of Service (QoS) intent requirements. Digital Service Providers (DSPs) must align with these requirements by prioritizing critical intents and reconfiguring resources when necessary. Network Slicing (NS) and Intent-Based Network (IBN) management have become essential tools for addressing the intent expectations of both current and future 6G services. This paper presents a robust optimization framework aimed at maximizing throughput while minimizing Energy Consumption (EC). The framework creates isolated network slices tailored to specific QoS intents, ensuring compliance with the performance metrics defined in Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Our findings indicate that, while this approach effectively meets SLA targets for specific slices, it conflicts with intent expectation of other slices and can compromise their performance, leading to significant degradation in throughput and EC costs. For instance, enforcing SLA objective for one specific slice means improving slice capacity while it has a huge decrease in the average throughput up to 65% and a decreased EC cost up to 81%.