Mission-Critical Public Safety Networking: An Intent-Driven Service Orchestration Perspective

Abstract: Intent-based networking (IBN) provides a promising approach for managing networks and orchestrating services in beyond 5G (B5G) deployments using modern service-based architectures. Public safety (PS) services form the basis of keeping society functional, owing to the responsiveness and availability throughout the network. The provisioning of these services requires efficient and agile network management techniques with low-overhead and embedded intelligence. IBN incorporates the service subscribers in a model-driven approach to provision different user-centric services. However, it requires domain-specific and contextual processing of intents for abstracted management of network functions. This work proposes an intent definition for PS and mission critical (MC) services in beyond B5G networks, as well as a processing and orchestration architecture on top of MC push-to-talk (PTT) use case. The simulation results show that MC PTT services adhere to the key performance indicators of access time and mouth-to-ear latency bounded by approximately 250 and 150 milliseconds, respectively, with an additional overhead experienced during the intent processing in the range of 20- 40 milliseconds. This validates the premise of IBN in providing flexible and scalable management and service orchestration solution for PS next generation networks.