The drift handling framework for open radio access networks: An experimental evaluation

The Open Radio Access Network (i.e., Open RAN) aims to transform the inflexible, proprietary RAN into one that is flexible, programmable, and disaggregated to provide intelligent solutions at the network edge for delivering the highly dynamic service demands of Beyond 5G (B5G) networks. Open RAN Working Group-2 (WG2) focuses on the architecture and standards of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) to meet the Service Level Agreement (SLA) requirements for emerging use cases. The inherent dynamic nature of B5G networks and their applications often leads to AI/ML model performance degradation (i.e., drift), resulting in violations of SLAs, over- or under-provisioning of resources, etc. This paper proposes a drift handling framework which includes drift detection, analysis, and its adaptation to minimize the SLA violations and efficient resource utilization. The proposed drift handling framework is evaluated across three diverse use cases: (i) Quality of Service prediction, (ii) Channel Quality Indicator prediction, and (iii) User traffic prediction. The experimental evaluations are performed by using the Open RAN Software Community, and OpenAirInterface FlexRIC platforms with a real-time dataset. Results demonstrate that the proposed drift handling framework outperforms all other considered state-of-the art frameworks for all the scenarios in terms of the drift detection time, accuracy, precision, F1-score, etc.