Recent Advances and Challenges in Network and Service Management of Next Generation 5G/6G Networks

Dear Colleagues,

It is well known that 5G networks and their evolution to 6G networks are transforming the telecommunication infrastructure landscape through the introduction of disruptive technologies in the network, enabling a rich ecosystem of services. The support of such services drives the transformation of several sectors vertically to the telecommunications industry, through new services/applications requiring ubiquitous high-speed connectivity, reliability and dense deployments. To cope with these requirements, 5G and beyond/6G networks will comprise versatile infrastructures consisting of multiple disaggregated pools of network, compute and storage resources, while network deployments are expected to appear in various (physical/vertical) environments as access network extensions of public or private networks. This heterogeneity of resources and versatility of networks brings challenges on how to effectively control, manage and orchestrate them.

To cope with these challenges, 5G/6G networks must be equipped with intelligent self-organizing and control capabilities to automate and optimize the key processes involved in network and service operation. This includes management of Radio Access and Optical Transport Networks (RANs and OTNs) and orchestration of services in Mobile Edge (MEC) and Cloud Computing resources. One of the key drivers of achieving this goal is the overall improvement of network and service management by leveraging the state of the art in Artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) for orchestrating the operation of the so called 5G/6G Edge to Cloud Continuum. The latter comprises compute, storage and network nodes that can be located anywhere across the 5G/6G architectural spectrum, offering a “computational fabric” spanning from constrained devices to powerful cloud systems.

To this end, we invite academic and industrial researchers to contribute original research and review articles to this Special Issue that address important challenges related to AI-powered management of 5G/6G networks and services. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Design and Architectures of Network Management Systems for 5G/6G Networks;
• New technologies for network management, control and orchestration of 5G/6G Networks;
• (O-)RAN management, spectrum sharing and allocation;
• Optimal CU-DU placement in disaggregated RANs;
• Network performance improvement and enhanced AI capabilities in Optical Transport Networks;
• 5G/6G Edge to Cloud continuum orchestration architectures and technologies;
• Optimisation algorithms for network and compute resource allocation in Edge to Cloud continuum;
• Intelligent energy efficient use of MEC and Cloud resources;
• AI/ML-based service placement and orchestration in the MEC/Cloud continuum;
• Intelligent scheduling and allocation of AI/ML workflows in the Edge-to-Cloud continuum;
• Innovative AI and 6G-enabled user applications;
• Security issues during network-enabled parallel and distributed computing in 5G/6G networks.

I look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Paris Flegkas
Guest Editor

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• 5G/6G network management
• service orchestration
• edge to cloud continuum
• disaggregated/open RAN
• optical transport networks
• AI/ML-based resource management