Beyond State Machines: Executing Network Procedures with Agentic Tool-Calling Sequences

Agentic AI will be an essential enabling technology for designing future mobile communication systems, which could provide flexible and customized services, automate complex network operations, and drive autonomous decision-making across the network. This work studies how Large Language Model (LLM)-based network AI agents can be utilized to execute network procedures expressed as sequences of tool invocations. We investigate four approaches, which differ in how the agent obtains the procedure and in how execution is distributed between the agent and the underlying tools. We evaluated the latency and execution correctness across these approaches using a User Equipment (UE) IP allocation procedure as a case study. Furthermore, we conduct a stress test to examine how many sequential procedural steps an LLM agent can reliably execute before failure. Our results show that approaches relying on iterative agent-side reasoning incur higher latency and are more prone to execution errors, while approaches where the procedure is encapsulated within a single tool, which internally orchestrates the required steps by invoking other tools, reduce latency by limiting repeated reasoning. The stress-test results further show that the model with advanced tool-calling capability maintains reliable execution over longer procedures than the other evaluated models; however, all models exhibit reliability degradation as procedure length increases, revealing clear execution limits in multi-step tool-based workflows. To systematically analyze failures in procedure execution, we introduce a procedure-specific error taxonomy that categorizes deviations in multi-step procedural execution.

Machine Learning-Driven Anomaly Detection for 5G O-RAN Performance Metrics

The ever-increasing reliance of critical services on network infrastructure coupled with the increased operational complexity of beyond-5G/6G networks necessitate the need for proactive and automated network fault management. The provision for open interfaces among different radio access network\,(RAN) elements and the integration of AI/ML into network architecture enabled by the Open RAN\,(O-RAN) specifications bring new possibilities for active network health monitoring and anomaly detection. In this paper we leverage these advantages and develop an anomaly detection framework that proactively detect the possible throughput drops for a UE and minimize the post-handover failures. We propose two actionable anomaly detection algorithms tailored for real-world deployment. The first algorithm identifies user equipment (UE) at risk of severe throughput degradation by analyzing key performance indicators (KPIs) such as resource block utilization and signal quality metrics, enabling proactive handover initiation. The second algorithm evaluates neighbor cell radio coverage quality, filtering out cells with anomalous signal strength or interference levels. This reduces candidate targets for handover by 41.27\% on average. Together, these methods mitigate post-handover failures and throughput drops while operating much faster than the near-real-time latency constraints. This paves the way for self-healing 6G networks.