Automatic Generation of Digital Twins for Network Testing
This addresses the need for faster validation tools in telecommunication networks, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing digital twin concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of time-consuming manual configuration of digital twins for network testing by proposing an automatic generation method, demonstrating feasibility with efficient and accurate results in an initial use case.
The increased use of software in the operation and management of telecommunication networks has moved the industry one step closer to realizing autonomous network operation. One consequence of this shift is the significantly increased need for testing and validation before such software can be deployed. Complementing existing simulation or hardware-based approaches, digital twins present an environment to achieve this testing; however, they require significant time and human effort to configure and execute. This paper explores the automatic generation of digital twins to provide efficient and accurate validation tools, aligned to the ITU-T autonomous network architecture's experimentation subsystem. We present experimental results for an initial use case, demonstrating that the approach is feasible in automatically creating efficient digital twins with sufficient accuracy to be included as part of existing validation pipelines.