Edge Concierge: Democratizing Cost-Effective and Flexible Network Operations using Network Layer AI at Private Network Edges

Abstract

We observe two major revolutionary trends in net-work operations: democratization of cost-effective and flexible communication means for vertical players, such as public safety, by private mobile networking combined with edge computing, and automatic and autonomic network operations empowered by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Further innovations are required for making private networking readily available for vertical players that are reluctant to acquire expertise in complex network operations. We propose Edge Concierge, of which concept is to democratize cost-effective and flexible network operations using network layer AI at private network edges. Edge Concierge assists smart network operations for private mobile network operators and energy saving by changing working state of AI-empowered anomaly detection applications by network layer AI. We also employ unsupervised machine learning using Hidden Markov Model (HMM) for estimating contexts by solely observing net-work traffic at mobile edge computing (MEC) middle boxes. In detail, we design a system of real-time and self-learning context estimation by a multi-level probabilistic state transition model trained by unsupervised learning, which is implemented in a commodity PC. In order to evaluate our proposed system, we take public safety context of smart cities as an example use case and show the benefits.