Towards Resilience: Slice-Driven Orchestration of Mobile IoMT in 6G-Edge-Continuum

Virtual Reality (VR) services delivered over 6G networks demand ultra-low latency and high bandwidth to ensure seamless user experiences. This paper presents an intelligent resource allocation and edge caching framework for 6G O-RAN networks, leveraging Deep Q-Network (DQN) learning for optimizing edge caching and dynamic resource provisioning across multiple network slices within an O-RAN-compliant architecture. By incorporating DRL agents into the network control plane, the proposed system enables proactive and adaptive content distribution as well as real-time computational resource allocation that meets the quality-of-service demands of eMBB, URLLC, and especially the emerging MBRLLC slices essential for VR. Simulation results demonstrate that the DQN-based framework consistently outperforms traditional methods in reducing latency and improving throughput, leading to more reliable and responsive support for immersive VR applications in 6G environments.

5G edge network slicing must reconcile two coupled requirements: understanding high-level operator intent and reallocating scarce computing and bandwidth resources under dynamic contention. Centralized optimization can face computational and responsiveness challenges under rapidly changing edge contention, and Multi-Agent System (MAS)-based auctions can support resource arbitration but still depend on operator-defined economic parameters and priorities. Embedding a Large Language Model (LLM) directly in a recurring control loop, by contrast, may introduce non-negligible inference latency and non-deterministic behavior. This paper proposes a two-timescale architecture that addresses this gap: an LLM-based Strategist translates natural-language network intents into economic policy parameters (budget, income, and bidding-aggressiveness) at the macro scale, while a deterministic, Vickrey-inspired second-price mechanism run by SPADE-based slice agents resolves recurring resource contention at the operational scale, with the resulting allocations enforced by patching Kubernetes CPU limits and Calico CNI bandwidth annotations directly on User Plane Function pods. We evaluate the architecture end-to-end on a real Kubernetes/Open5GS edge cluster across two complementary scenarios, each repeated 30 times: a Smart-City scenario, in which natural-language public-safety intents propagate into measurable changes in slice bids and bandwidth allocations within a few auction rounds, and a Hierarchical-slicing scenario, in which the mechanism provides priority-dependent resource and QoE differentiation, adapts to abrupt demand changes, and preserves configured minimum guarantees while maintaining near-complete allocation of the shared bandwidth pool.

Supporting edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) inference as a network service is challenging because current mobile systems can transport tensors but do not expose or understand the inference context that gives those tensors operational meaning. Prior studies have addressed this gap through dynamic partitioning, collaborative inference, and split pipelines; however, these solutions remain application-bound, network-blind, or context-free. This work proposes Inference on Demand (IoD), an inference-on-demand abstraction that exposes split inference through a CAMARA-like Application Program Interface (API) and carries a split-aware tensor context in-band across the 5G user plane path. We evaluate the IoD on a programmable user plane function (UPF)-based testbed using a partitionable visual AI workload, showing that adaptive split selection can operate as a network-facing service while avoiding the rigid cost profile of static configurations. Including our findings, split inference becomes more than offloading when the service intent, runtime partitioning, and tensor transport are made visible to the mobile data plane. This opens a path toward network-native AI services, in which programmable telco infrastructure coordinates computation, context, and connectivity for user-facing applications.