Doctoral Candidate at Orange Polska Spolka Akcyjna through ELIXIRION Project

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) Network Function Virtualization (NFV) architectural framework enables network services across multiple infrastructure/ orchestration domains, supporting Cloud-native/ Virtual Network Function (VNF) placement algorithms, but without any commercial solutions, and current virtualized networks still being rather static. The increasing pressure on cost/energy efficiency of network operators requires enabling dynamic network operation, to meet the required Quality of Service (QoS). The ETSI NFV Industry Specification Group (ISG) has just started working on energy efficiency. Healthcare 4.0 services also have very strict reliability and safety requirements and a prevalence of independently administered private networks. In case of proprietary solutions implemented by network service tenants, it may be necessary to split the E2E service chain into multiple pieces in separate domains, while the offer for tenants (e.g., infrastructure providers) may vary over time. Finally, there is a lack of comprehensive business models to exploit the added value of a healthcare slice.

Doctoral Candidate’s (DC) role: The DC will advance the SoA by developing Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven algorithms to support automated orchestration for continuous lifecycle operations of E2E network slices towards Healthcare 4.0 targeting at 50% higher cost/energy efficiency than State of the Art (SoA). The algorithms will choose the optimum split of the network service chain across different domains, including private networks, represented by their respective brokers as well as the allocation of communication, computational and storage resources supporting a massive number of devices. The continuous process of the dynamic E2E network slice template implementation design will exploit iterative, game theory-based negotiations with brokers to achieve the optimal trade-off between the challenging Healthcare 4.0 service requirements and cost/energy efficiency criteria varying over time. Finally, comprehensive business models will be developed to showcase the investment opportunities to the involved stakeholders.