How to Design Autonomous Service Level Agreements for 6G

Abstract

With the growing demand for network connectivity and diversity of network applications, one primary challenge that network service providers are facing is managing the commitments for Service Level Agreements~(SLAs). Service providers typically monitor SLAs for management tasks such as improving their service quality, customer billing and future network planning. Network service customers, on their side, monitor SLAs to optimize network usage and apply, when required, penalties related to service failures. In future 6G networks, critical network applications such as remote surgery and connected vehicles will require these SLAs to be more dynamic, flexible, and automated to match their diverse requirements on network services. Moreover, these SLAs should be transparent to all stakeholders to address the trustworthiness on network services and service providers required by critical applications. Currently, there is no standardised method to immutably record and audit SLAs, leading to challenges in aspects such as SLA enforcement and accountability -- traits essential for future network applications. This work explores new requirements for future service contracts, that is, on the evolution of SLAs. Based on those new requirements, we propose an end to end layered SLA architecture leveraging Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and smart contracts. Our architecture is inheritable by an existing telco-application layered architectural frameworks to support future SLAs. We also discuss some limitations of DLT and smart contracts and provide several directions of future studies.