Autonomous Networks: Empowering digital transformation – evolving from Level 2/3 towards Level 4 (IG1326)

TM Forum and its industry partners jointly release this fifth edition of the Autonomous Networks journey guide. Our goal is to continuously lead development in the AN industry, guide CSPs to plan and deploy AN, and promote industry prosperity. This year, our state-of-the industry report focuses in these areas:

• Advances in AN – three important social value initiatives and four business value indicators for AN are described in detail. General characteristics of L3 and L4 autonomous behavior are clearly defined from the business perspective. Core theories and enabling technologies of L4 and L5 are proposed.
• Best practices to guide AN strategy and implementation – a more systematic and instructive implementation method is proposed to describe the definitions, value and application scenarios of the four elements key to AN implementation. This includes key effectiveness indicators (KEIs), ANL standards, a target architecture and autonomous map.
  Best practices from leading CSPs regarding the design and promotion of the four key elements are provided, including the methods, implementation experience and phase-by-phase achievements. Multiple high-value commercial use cases to serve as a reference for industry partners. Use cases not selected for inclusion and use cases from previous reports can be found in TM Forum’s Autonomous Networks Realization Studies (IG1218C).
• Collaboration and promotion of industry prosperity – third-party AN standards, implementation solutions and phase-by-phase achievements are shared along with an update on CSPs’ AN planning and deployment. We also look at the challenges to largescale deployment of ANs and provide insights from the analyst community about trends in the AN industry.

We hope that more CSPs can embark on the AN journey and continuously improve their AN levels. Together, we strive to work with all industry partners to develop a healthy and prosperous AN ecosystem.