Abstract
Whether a smart pipe or an integrated platform for content, communication, and computation, our telecommunications networks are becoming more complex. The wide scale deployment of virtualisation has unlocked the power of progamability, and with it intelligent control. The breadth of technologies available to realise this intelligent control is growing by the day; encompassing static rules, ML technologies, and now large language models (so-called ‘generativeAI’). This explosion of abilities is leading to new scalability and conflict challenges in not only managing network operation, but also these intelligent technologies themselves. This talk explores the role that autonomous networks has to play in this sea of technologies and describes how the recently published ITU-T “Autonomous Networks-Architecture Framework” can serve as a harmonising design language to bring these different intelligence and use cases together, as well as what is missing for the future. This is complemented by some examples of research activities at the University of Glasgow related to how we are trying to realise this convergence.
