Artificial Intelligence in network evolution makes things much better than what it was in the past.

Internet connectivity has been growing at around 2% between 2015 – 2019. But over the last 2 years, it has grown by 8% which is a drastic increase in connectivity. Change in professional and personal life demands since the last two years has led to a transition in the user's expectations. From work from anywhere to e-healthcare and online education, the transition of everything from offline to online has led to growth in connectivity over the period. Adding to the listed gaming and entertainment have scaled up the expectations of the users by many folds. Customer Experience has taken a centre stage for all the Communication Service Providers. To meet these expectations, modern networks are becoming more complex. Experience Disruption has replaced Service Disruption today.

What to expect?

The new experience paradigm is expected to bring about various changes. Measuring Experience, Troubleshooting these networks with End to End Insights would be a key factor. Machine Reasoning, Machine Learning are going to play a vital role in this Network Evolution. Networks are going to get smarter and adapt to the needs of the consumers.

Artificial Intelligence is going to play a key role in the following areas

Awareness – Measurement & Prediction of Experience

Reasoning – Root cause Analysis in Networks

Interactive – Natural Language Interaction

Mature – Intelligence that would Evolve over time and correct decisions

Autonomous – Self adjust to the needs of the consumes

This is the new ARIMA of networks.

Awareness – Powered by Artificial Intelligence, networks would be completely aware of the type & nature of Connected Devices and their current bandwidth requirements. By understanding the trends, Networks of WiFi connections for home as well as in offices should be able to measure and personalize the experience of each user that comes on board. For certain IoT devices latency could be critical, but for other devices bandwidth. AI will help the networks to become completely aware of these demands. As home and office networks always have many devices working in tandem, it is important that AI optimizes the networks to obtain a collective optimum smooth user experience.

Reasoning: Network Engineers always equip themselves with a lot of Network Monitoring tools which help them to be very confident and in control of the networks. Conventionally, when we face issues with the network, the process of complaining and getting the issue resolved takes a lot of time. Artificial intelligence-powered networks would help reduce the task of dealing with the entire process of complaining to a great extent. The problem could be escalated and necessary troubleshooting could be done in a few clicks. The problem will be recorded as soon as the user faces any issue with the network and diagnosis for the same will take place automatically without any human intervention. The root cause will automatically be identified and the resolution will be accelerated.

Interactive – Natural Language Engines have got the power to bring about a great evolution. NLP provides Networks a voice to interact with humans in a way like never before. We have been seeing products like Alexa which are bridging the gap of communication between IoT devices and humans using Voice Interface. Network Admin and Home Users can interact with the network in a similar way. Networks would be able to understand human indentions and adapt accordingly.

Mature – AI allows the transfer of the intelligence possessed by the Network Experts to Routers, Switches, and other elementals which are part of the network. Working in tandem with each other and with customer Experience as feedback systems in place, Machine Learning models engage in continuous learning and constantly optimize to maximize the experience.

Autonomous – Integrating artificial intelligence in networks gives a switch from traditional reactive methods to proactive methods. Automating the method of finding a problem, diagnosing it, and prescribing a solution, help in the reduction of human interventions. With this proactive approach, we can expect maximum uptime of the network as the solution to the problem is identified and accelerated. This eventually will help the IT department to focus on its core objectives.

How AI in networks can make our lives better

Technology evolves over time; it makes things much better than what it was in the past. With these new changes and enhancements, new vulnerabilities arise as well. Nothing has been more frustrating than not being able to connect to the network or getting slow internet despite having connectivity. Other than this, the safety of our information uploaded could be prone to risk. Sudden loss of network in the mid of an urgent task makes a user feel as if the world took a halt. AI has left no industry untouched. The network industry is no exception to that.

Following are a few transformations that have begun with artificial intelligence getting into networks.

• Increased Network Uptimes
• Predictive Maintenance
• Rapid issue resolution
• Anomaly Detection
• Network Security

Since the pandemic, we saw a great shift across all the major industries to the digital space. This shift has increased the importance of the availability of a superior and consistent network across the globe.

Technology is evolving at an extreme pace; more network transformations in the future will arise. Networks will also start evolving just like humans at a pace that we cannot imagine as the computing powers are growing rapidly. New technologies that are coming to play, can potentially make the networks and devices associated with them mimic human intelligence and reasoning.

Authored

Pramod Gummaraj, CEO, Aprecomm