Autonomous Private Mobile Networks: State of the Art and Future Challenges

As mobile systems for private use are gaining momentum, the area of network management automation is bound to attract renewed attention from standardization organizations and vendors. Prominent examples of tasks that would benefit from network automation tools are provisioning, diagnosing, and healing. Nevertheless, due to the various network and service providers as well as stakeholders involved in the deployment of a non-public mobile system, the success of such automation heavily depends on a smooth and effective interoperability among the components of the overall system. In this paper, we review the state of the art of network operations, administration, and management in the context of non-public mobile systems, highlighting the differences with respect to traditional public networks. In order to emulate the evolution of such mobile network architectures implemented with heterogeneous software, we provide preliminary results on automated provisioning based on a research testbed under continuous integration. Finally, we propose a list of future challenges in this research area.