Intent-Based Orchestration in Open RAN: An ns-3 Simulation Framework

Abstract

This paper presents an extensible ns-3-based simulation framework for evaluating intent-based, semantics-aware control in Open RAN architectures. The framework integrates external Radio Access Network (RAN) Intelligent Controller (RIC) components and supports fine-grained control via internal distributed applications (dApps), enabling intent-based RAN orchestration across different timescales while maintaining standardized network behavior. As an illustrative use case, we implement an intent-based dApp for radio resource management (RRM) under realistic observability constraints. The scheduling problem is formulated using realistic key performance measurements (KPMs) available to dApps, together with a newly introduced Intent Satisfaction Score (ISS), which quantifies the delivery of intent-relevant information by combining distortion- and perception-oriented measures. Simulation results show that intent-based RRM can improve ISS while significantly reducing radio resource usage and computational overhead, at the cost of a moderate reduction in packet delivery ratio and throughput.