AI Sessions for Network-Exposed AI-as-a-Service

Abstract: Cloud-based AI inference is increasingly latency- and context-sensitive, yet today's AI-as-a-Service is typically consumed as an application-chosen endpoint, leaving the network to provide only best-effort transport. This decoupling prevents enforceable tail-latency guarantees, compute-aware admission control, and continuity under mobility. This paper proposes Network-Exposed AI-as-a-Service (NE-AIaaS) built around a new service primitive: the AI Session (AIS)-a contractual object that binds model identity, execution placement, transport Quality-of-Service (QoS), and consent/charging scope into a single lifecycle with explicit failure semantics. We introduce the AI Service Profile (ASP), a compact contract that expresses task modality and measurable service objectives (e.g., time-to-first-response/token, p99 latency, success probability) alongside privacy and mobility constraints. On this basis, we specify protocol-grade procedures for (i) DISCOVER (model/site discovery), (ii) AI PAGING (context-aware selection of execution anchor), (iii) two-phase PREPARE/COMMIT that atomically co-reserves compute and QoS resources, and (iv) make-before-break MIGRATION for session continuity. The design is standard-mappable to Common API Framework (CAPIF) style northbound exposure, ETSI Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) execution substrates, 5G QoS flows for transport enforcement, and Network Data Analytics Function (NWDAF) style analytics for closed-loop paging/migration triggers.