Work

Attention to Virtualization: Making Network Digital Twins Aware of Network Slicing

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: In order to accommodate myriad disparate services, from legacy voice and data, to niche network applications for industry verticals, 6G networks are expected to heavily exploit the concept of network slicing introduced in 5G. However, the increased complexity of sliced networks amplifies the risk of configuration errors, necessitating the expanded use of Network Digital Twins (NDTs) for proactive service assurance. Legacy NDTs, are ill-suited to highly virtualized environments, as they fail to model the impact of virtualization on physical infrastructure and overlook long-term dependency effects. In this work, we highlight the performance impact of virtualization and introduce an attention-enhanced Graph Neural Networks (GNN)-based NDT to address these challenges. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed NDT framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models in accurately predicting service Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) across disparate use cases.

Source: IEEE Network

DOI: 10.1109/mnet.2025.3552137

Authors: Alejandro Calvillo-Fernandez, Toni Dimitrovski, Milan Groshev, Aditya Ganesh, Constantine Ayimba, Antonio de la Oliva

Institutions: Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research

Language: English

Topic: Software-Defined Networks and 5G

Subfield: Computer Networks and Communications

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Industry, innovation and infrastructure

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $2,995