Network digital twins (NDTs) are emerging as a key catalyst on the journey to autonomous operations. While real-life twins, especially in their early years can be quite a handful and require careful management, in the case of digital twins, it is just the opposite! They can be quite handy in simplifying network management by reducing the need for human attention. As the telecom industry continues to undergo a revolution, fuelled by 5G, the evolution of cloud-native technologies, and open ecosystems, the demand for "always-on" networks with guaranteed SLAs for personalized experiences, continues to grow. NDTs play a significant role in enabling these services and experiences.

What are network digital twins?

Network digital twins are virtual representations of real-world networks, that are constantly updated with real-time data. While network digital twins at the domain level have been around for a while, focusing on domain-specific planning, dimensioning, traffic, and resource management aspects, emerging standards like ZSM and ITU-T are exploring "service digital twins" or "end-to-end digital twins," or “system twins”. These have a cross-domain focus and provide a holistic model for understanding impacts on service performance, potential issues due to changes in network behaviour, and means to optimize efficiency in operations. They provide a simulation environment for planning and operating networks while having a comprehensive view of network entities, their states, traffic, and their interactions.

The above figure captures the end-to-end NDT with the following key components:

• Data is used to create a digital replica of the physical entities leveraging network data models and network state.  

• Models are used to deliver a summarized view of the network for a particular context.

• Intelligence brings the capabilities to predict behaviours of given scenarios and run what-if scenarios.

• Closed-loop management builds the interaction between the virtual and physical network, including providing recommendations on the actions to be performed.

“Twin-first” approach to operations

End-to-end digital twins are no longer a futuristic concept; they're the key to unlocking a new era of network operations. Nokia's "twin first" approach puts digital twins at the heart of every decision, where operations are executed first in the twin environment.

• Imagine a world where:

  • Planning is risk-free: Before a service is launched, you can assess the feasibility of a new service on a digital twin, ensuring smooth deployment and minimizing potential failures.

  • Maintenance is proactive: Simulations on the digital twin reveal vulnerabilities before they impact real-world networks, eliminating the need for unplanned downtime and maximizing network uptime.

  • Operations are optimized: Evaluate alternatives and pre-verify outcomes on the digital twin without impacting the real network to arrive at optimal recommendations to solve service problems or fine-tune the performance.

  • Care is predictive: Potential failures are identified and addressed before they occur, ensuring a resilient and available network that's always one step ahead.

This ensures that potential issues are identified and mitigated, fine-tuned for improved accuracy thereby enabling a path to zero wait, zero trouble networks. Digital twins can be leveraged for several use cases:

• Proactive planning and what-if analysis: Consider the scenario of taking down a router for maintenance, without knowing the potential impact caused by this action. With NDTs, you can run a "what-if" analysis to assess the impact on end-user services, identify potential bottlenecks, and ensure sufficient redundancy. This proactive approach eliminates surprises and ensures seamless service continuity. In the case of network slice operations, one can understand the impact on slice performance under various failure scenarios, from network function outages to link failures and overload conditions to identify potential vulnerabilities and propose solutions before they impact real-world operations.

• Boosting business agility and customer engagement: A service digital twin, powered by a NDT, can assess the network's readiness for a new service, identify potential capacity/resource bottlenecks, and even suggest the best deployment strategy to meet agreed service level agreements (SLAs). This allows operators to be more agile in responding to market demands and deliver a superior customer experience.

• Maximizing efficiency and service delivery: NDTs can optimize network resource allocation, find optimal service configurations, and ensure efficient service delivery. With a digital twin, policies and automation can be pre-validated in a sandbox environment to simulate their impact and identify potential issues before deploying them in production. This eliminates the need for multiple trial-and-error iterations, saving time and resources.

Our approach to realizing the service digital twin

Nokia’s Digital Operations Center addresses digital twins for service and the end-to-end network layer by leveraging the capabilities coming from Nokia Orchestration Center, Nokia Assurance Center, and Nokia Unified Inventory as depicted in the figure below.

• The unified data repository and entity management hold a near-real-time view of the data from the physical network. This forms the foundational layer for the virtual twin view, including the operational state, performance, configuration, and topology of the network and relies on advanced observability concepts. 

• The data operations and models include the intelligence capabilities that enable network digital twins modeling, prediction, and recommendations for simulated scenarios.

• AIOps and intent management are two key pillars that incorporate the knowledge to support such intelligence, also relying on AI/ML and GenAI capabilities. GenAI helps to bring more autonomy in the form of autonomous agents, auto-generated policies, and workflows, etc. This helps to turn the shared situation awareness and what-if predictions into business value, like in the case of end-to-end network planning & optimization under dynamic operating conditions.

• The automation layer enables the control and pushing of desired changes from the virtual to the physical network

The Future of Network Operations

NDTs are not just a tool for network optimization; they represent a fundamental shift in how we approach end-to-end operations. Digital twins offer a powerful way to simulate real-world scenarios, predict outcomes, and make informed decisions before any changes are implemented.  The power of simulation and analysis will be transformative for operations in driving customer experience and service differentiation while optimizing costs and lowering the risk to operations. Service providers can embrace NDTs to improve their processes, workflows, and decision making to increase operational speed, efficiency, and to deliver a higher service quality.

Find out more about our Digital Operations Center solutions here.