English

Performance Comparison of IBN orchestration using LLM and SLMs

Networking and Internet Architecture 2026-03-10 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

The evolution of both 5G and 6G networks is driving the advancement of fully autonomous network management, placing Intent-Based Networking at the centre of this transformation. This paper introduces a novel framework for 5G and 6G IBN orchestration that leverages a stateful, hierarchical multi-agent architecture to achieve full automation using both SLMs and LLMs. Both models have been evaluated for translation accuracy using metrics such as BLEU, METEOR, and ROUGE-L, as well as computational complexity. Experimental results show that both models exhibit similar accuracy. However, result shows that SLMs can improve the overall completion speed of the IBN lifecycle by 20%.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.06647,
  title  = {Performance Comparison of IBN orchestration using LLM and SLMs},
  author = {Wai Lwin Phone and Brahim El Boudani and Tasos Dagiuklas and Saptarshi Ghosh},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.06647},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted for presentation at IEEE International Conference on Communications 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:07:35.961Z