AI-driven Networks Working Group (AINWG)

Chair: Prof. Wang-Cheol Song (Jeju National University/KOREN Forum, Korea)

Co-Chair: Dr. Hidehisa Nagano (NICT, Japan)

Co-Chair: Prof. Huang Xiaohong (Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China)

Recently, network technologies have become the focus of a huge transformation enabled by new models resulting from virtualization and cloud computing. This development towards enhanced design opportunities along with increased complexity in networking as well as in networked applications has fueled the need for improved network automation in agile infrastructures. To this end, over the past few decades, AI techniques have been leveraged to intelligently perform a variety of networking operations in future networks, ranging from management to maintenance and protection. More precisely, with the combination of AI-designed underlying network topologies and AI-driven software-defined networking, we shall eventually see more profound evolutions of what networks are capable of, across all industries.

Despite all these advantages of AI-driven networks, only few countries have so far applied AI to real networks due to the limitedly deployed SDN/NFV infrastructures. This led KOREN Forum to decide to propose a working group, AI-driven Networks Working Group (AINWG) to share advanced experiences among all APAN members to efficiently design, manage, maintain, and protect their respective NRENs for the mutual benefits of all countries. Hence, AINWG was initiated at the APAN 50 meeting held in August 2020 as the first BoF sessions as shown in the figure, which was followed by its second BoF sessions at the APAN 51 meeting held in February 2021. Consequently, its first working group sessions were held at the APAN 52 meeting in August 2021. All these sessions witnessed a huge turnout of researchers in the APAN community.

The ultimate goal of AINWG is to encourage the collaboration of technical experiences and knowledge regarding AI-enabled networks. This shall lead to the development of an intelligent, scalable, sustainable, and easy-to-deploy technical platform for each APAN member country to manage its respective NRENs. To this end, the AINWG intends to promote sharing of experiences for developing intelligence in NRENs, bring intelligent automation in APAN networks, create intelligent operation automation in NOCs, and collaborate to integrate intelligent networks in the APAN community.