Early adopters are showing how clear, well-defined use cases can accelerate insight discovery through experimentation with partial digital twins. This is opening up a whole new way of exploring telecoms networks – and defending them against hazard.
To some extent, this is a redundant question. The whole point of a digital twin is that it should allow any use case that could be delivered in your real network to be explored in a virtual environment. They are meant to be a complete replica, after all.
There are already plenty of ideas for how a digital twin can, in time, deliver benefits. For example, the Innovative Optical Wireless Network Global Forum (IOWN GF) has catalogued a number of scenarios it reckons are suited to the application of digital twins . These range from optimizing network transport, to analyzing security traffic – and on to building greener networks.
IOWN also reports multiple activities in industry groups that are focused on standardizing or building templates for such initiatives – with the IETF, ETSI, the TMF and others all actively pursuing such aims.
The promise digital twins offer is well-recognized and understood. The industry is clearly advancing towards the goal of delivering comprehensive digital twins.
However, as we noted in our recent blog, What are the Potential Benefits of Digital Twins for Telecoms Networks and Operators, building such a comprehensive virtual replica of your network is complex and requires much more than just data access. We’re not quite ready to accomplish this, even if we can see the value that they could deliver. But we also noted that we can begin to build micro models and explore specific domains through a partial digital twin that is specifically oriented the data that we do have available.
So, a better question is: what use cases might be realized through such a partial digital twin implementation? What can we do today that can leverage the principles of a complete digital twin but in miniature, so we can learn practical lessons and explore solutions to today’s problems
Perhaps the best place to start is to consider different domains of the network in isolation – indeed, that’s also a point made by the IOWN (“Network Digital Twin Use Case”, IOWN GF, 2024), as it also focuses on specific domains as well as the network in general – for example, optical transport layer optimization.
Another example is the RAN. While this connects to the macro network, the RAN is a key and clearly defined area within the overall network topology. As such, it can more easily be modelled. And, if we restrict the view we wish to take to isolated episodes or specific events, we can ease adoption still further.