AI-assisted intent-based traffic grooming in a dynamically shared 5g optical fronthaul network

The extremely high number of services with large bandwidth requirements and the increasingly dynamic traffic patterns of cell sites pose major challenges to optical fronthaul networks, rendering them incapable of coping with the extensive, uneven, and real-time traffic that will be generated in the future. In this paper, we first present the design of an adaptive graph convolutional network with gated recurrent unit (AGCN-GRU) network to learn the temporal and spatial dependencies of traffic patterns of cell sites to provide accurate traffic predictions, in which the AGCN model can capture potential spatial relations according to the similarity of network traffic patterns in different areas. Then, we innovatively consider how to deal with the unpredicted burst traffic and propose an AI-assisted intent-based traffic grooming scheme to realise automatic and intelligent cell sites clustering and traffic grooming. Finally, a software-defined testbed for 5G optical fronthaul network was established, on which the proposed schemes were deployed and evaluated by considering traffic datasets of existing optical networks. The experimental results showed that the proposed scheme can optimize network resource allocation, increase the average efficient resource utilization and reduce the average delay and the rejection ratio.