Abstractions for Network Intelligence: A Reference Architecture for AI at the Wireless Edge
This paper addresses the problem of inadequate support for awareness sharing between networks and AI applications, which is crucial for improving network utilization and application performance for network operators and application developers.
The paper proposes a reference architecture, AI-EDGE, to facilitate synergistic interaction between intelligent applications and intelligent networks, specifically at the wireless edge. It aims to improve network utilization and application performance by enabling awareness sharing through an information waist and supporting network intelligence services.
Networks are increasingly adopting AI as are AI applications leveraging networks. Awareness sharing between networks and AI applications promises to unlock higher levels of network utilization and application performance, but is inadequately supported in the current architecture of the Internet. In this paper, we describe a reference architecture that abstractly enables the synergistic interaction of intelligent applications and the intelligent network, via an information waist, and also supports the network intelligence services in the emerging intelligence plane in networks. We discuss the rationale for our AI-EDGE architecture, its functional requirements, and the core abstractions. We present a reference component-level design of the core abstractions to support experimentation and development on existing platforms for wireless networking (i.e., based on O-RAN cellular networks) and edge computing (i.e., based on 3GPP Edge App and ETSI MEC). Moreover, we provide representative use cases from the perspective of different types of users that demonstrate the benefits of the architecture in contexts of awareness sharing, portability, prototyping, and validation.