The advent of powerful ICT and the availability of large amounts of data have triggered an increased interest in the discipline of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The digital transformation of economy and society has brought data ecosystems to the core of many vertical industries. This has catapulted AI from niche discipline to the front of recent ICT research trends, including network research.

Systems beyond 5G are set to shift the network communication paradigm, which will heavily affect the information and communication sector. 5G is expected to deliver increased connectivity, highly fault-tolerant communication, and maximum spectral efficiency while keeping latencies at negligible limits. The aspiration is to transform the current 5G wireless thinking from focusing on “local” improvements (e.g. isolating the radio access level or the resource management level) to realizing a vision of pervasive mobile virtual services through network-managing computing and connectivity functions in an integrated way. This beyond 5G transformation envisions bringing together novel radio architectures and an Artificial Intelligence (AI) network approach across various tiers of the technology stack and deployment scenarios.

Interview with Hans Dieter Schotten from DFKI: Artificial Intelligence has become fashionable in all areas of technological development, including communication networks. How realistic are expectations that AI will significantly improve 5G and beyond networks? When will it happen? And what are the obstacles? Eurescom message editor-in-chief Milon Gupta asked someone about it who has been at the forefront of network development for a long time – professor Hans Dieter Schotten, head of the research department Intelligent Networks at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, DFKI.

One of the enablers of 5G and beyond networks is the provisioning of network slices with proper Quality of Experience (QoE) guarantees to meet the requirements of vertical use cases. It poses several challenges to the proper management of the network slices. This is particularly challenging when provisioning multi-domain 5G slices in which several network service providers are required to provision their end-to-end slices.