Zero-Load: A Zero Touch Network based router management scheme underlying 6G-IoT ecosystems.

The rising data volumes force significant bottlenecks on the 6G for IoT (6G-IoT) network management functions, which limits the control, flexibility, and interoperability among devices, protocols, and end applications. Solutions like software-defined networking (SDN), and network function virtualization (NFV) are proposed with 6G, but the core management operations are still manual. Thus, to automatically upscale these 6G-IoT networks at reduced cost orchestration complexity, zero-touch networks (ZTN) are proposed. ZTN in 6G-IoT allows a high degree of automation and seamless integration of services. The article proposes a scheme, Zero-Load, that integrates ZTN at the core routing functionality of the 6G-IoT applications. We present a load balancing and traffic classification scheme through the ZTN networking stack for core routers. The ZTN router configuration fabric connects applications with the core services. Further, we present a Gaussian kernel-based support vector machine (SVM) classifier at the ZTN automation layer, which classifies the normal traffic and attack traffic. The proposed work is compared for parameters like mean time to response (MTTR), and resolution latency against baseline SDN and NFV schemes. Using ZTN, an average improvement of 32.45% is obtained in MTTR, and 87.89% in resolution latency (against a query). Using the Gaussian RBF kernel, an accuracy of 0.9914 is reported. These results indicate that ZTN-based management paves the way toward a more dense and intelligent 6G-IoT network.