To remain successful in the 4th Industrial Revolution, CSPs need to ensure they can constantly evolve based on customers’ requirements, new trends, and technological changes. Some of the requirements of these demands present sizable hurdles to overcome - greater broadband capacity, faster connections, the ability to accommodate exponentially more connected devices, and extending the boundaries of the service area to the edge. The quest to meet these requirements is fueling the push for new IoT deployments and 5G rollouts taking place across the globe.
Digital twins can help facilitate IoT deployments and 5G rollouts and are entering mainstream use to do so. A telecom providers’ entire network, or parts of it such as sites, towers, network elements, physical and logical connections and services, virtualized resources, and configuration parameters can all be replicated as a digital twin to address the increased complexity that these changes will bring.
Benefits of a digital twin
As a digital twin is fully synchronized with the original, dynamic updates reflect real world changes. Changes to a network can be planned first with the digital twin, then executed in the network, and finally verified against the digital twin through data reconciliation. This closed loop principle is integral for high data consistency and optimized operational processes.
The objective of a digital twin is to understand the state of the object that it replicates, respond to changes, improve business operations, and ultimately add value. Its purpose is to act as a mirror to simulate, predict and forecast the behavior of its real-world counterpart. For service providers and telecom operators, it is an approach that enables them to manage their network and services in an intelligent, proactive, dynamic, and automated way.
Applications for a digital twin
Streamlining operations, service assurance, design, planning, capacity management and service fulfillment can be difficult due to the disparate nature of a hybrid network infrastructure. A digital twin can assist in all these areas by providing complex coordination and tracking. In particular, it can replicate and visualize the hybrid network infrastructure as a geo-referenced or schematic representation that shows all relevant infrastructure and resource details about used and available capacities, as well as dependencies and relationships between the resources across the technologies and vendors.
Let’s take a closer look at how a digital twin enables and supports the uses cases that matter most to CSPs:
Operations and service assurance
Since a digital twin can be used to run various simulations, it can identify customers who may be affected by planned maintenance so you can notify them in advance or reroute connections. The data contained in a digital twin enables and optimizes running a what/if simulation of this task. The digital twin reveals all of the connections and services that will be affected, and a report can detail the connections and services running over the card. Algorithms calculate whether a service is up or down based on the underlying redundancies and protections applied in the network. This simulation provides the inputs needed for the operator to either reroute connections or inform customers about downtime.
A digital twin can also be used to perform an impact analysis of an outage by analyzing and simulating the impact to services and to customers when there’s an outage. If there is a cable break on a physical connection between two active nodes, the digital twin can calculate the connections and services affected and provide results, including identifying redundant routing and which services are down. A signal trace of the network connection supports using OTDR measurement data to calculate precisely where the fault is located. The digital twin can provide the geo-coordinates and show the location on a map.
Design, planning, and capacity management
From small changes to large network transformations and complete rollouts, the accurate replication of the network and its data is one of the most valuable benefits a digital twin delivers. A mobile network scenario provides a good example of how a digital twin can be used to assist planning additional resources based on current capacities and resources. A digital twin-based approach cuts rollout times dramatically by managing the site selection process and optimizing every phase of the rollout.
To start, you will need a digital twin that represents the as- is status of your network and your current mobile sites. A digital twin can provide a digital replication of your network to be used in scenarios such as one in which mobile sites and the assigned nodes are connected in the fronthaul to an edge data center, which is then connected to the core data center via the midhaul/backhaul. The edge data center uses server infrastructure and switch-based network connectivity. All of this can be displayed in a 2D footprint visualization of the container-based edge data center site.
Depending on the functionality supported by the digital twin, the edge date center can also be visualized in a 3D footprint in which you can zoom in and walk through, select a device, and access additional information. For example, you may need specific details about a server or server-cluster, which is hosting several virtualized applications. The digital twin will not only show that information, it will also show the virtual resources running on the servers, with all the dependencies between the relevant 5G slices on the top layer and the underlying virtualized resources, down to hardware and network resources.
Fulfillment and service orchestration
Fulfillment and orchestration use cases typically operate with both resources available in the network as well as resources still in the rollout phase. Since the digital twin covers both available and planned resources, it is the ideal central system of record to simulate, plan and run fulfillment and service orchestration scenarios. As a multi-vendor, multi-technology, and multi-domain platform, a digital twin provides all relevant physical, logical and virtual resources across the entire hybrid network infrastructure within an integrated data model.
A digital twin also supports customer requests for both standardized products requiring service orchestration including CPE rollout and configuration and for non-standardized B2B solutions. In both cases, the digital twin can provide the available resource data and required parameters for rollout, provisioning, and configuration management in addition to enabling feasibility analysis, planning, and rollout orchestration.
Digital twin checklist
Certain features and capabilities are essential for a digital twin to deliver on its full potential. The following list provides key features to look for as you evaluate potential solutions:
- Vendor-agnostic, uniform data model: All types of resources must be represented via a vendor-agnostic data model. Thisis a mandatory prerequisite for any digital twin scenario.
- Synchronizes with your network: A digital twin must always reflect any changes made, regardless of whether executed manually or via any kind of orchestration, fulfillment of other type of management system.
- Integrates with other relevant OSS/BSS/IT solutions: The integration is essential as the digital twin works as a data hub to fully support, analyze and simulate “real world scenarios”.
- Strong visualization, reporting and analytics capabilities: The digital twin encompasses a huge amount of data, relationships and dependencies. Knowledge-based decisions yield better outcomes, but data transparency is the precondition.
- Ability to properly manage user access: Defining specific rights and permissions of individual users and groups is important with a digital twin. Guardrails are critical to protect the data and prevent unauthorized access and changes.
