A Marketplace Solution for Distributed Network Management and Orchestration of Slices

The H2020 Distributed management of Network Slices in beyond 5G (MonB5G) project aims to provide zero-touch management and orchestration to support network slicing at scale to reduce the management burden on mobile operators by leveraging distribution of operations along with advanced data-driven Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based mechanisms. However, while this approach shows promise and large companies with abundant data and ML expertise are developing powerful ML-driven services, a critical aspect that remains to be analyzed is its business case. The vast majority of potentially valuable ML services, such as predictive maintenance, Quality of Service (QoS) optimization, network security enhancements, remain stuck at the idea or prototype stage. This paper delves into an analysis of how the MonB5G solutions in particular the tuples (Monitoring System (MS), Analytics Engine (AE), Decision Engine (DE) and Actuator (ACT) could be applied within the network management and orchestration market while investigating various business models and value chains. Numerical results based on experimental data have also been performed to evaluate the OpEX (Operational Expenditure) benefits associated with different network management techniques, for centralized and distributed systems.