A digital twin network solution for end-to-end network service level agreement (SLA) assurance

Abstract

With the gradual development of the 5G industry network and applications, each industry application has various network performance requirements, while customers hope to upgrade their industrial structures by leveraging 5G technologies. The guarantee of service level agreement (SLA) requirements is becoming more and more important, especially SLA performance indicators, such as delay, jitter, bandwidth, etc. For network operators to fulfill customer’s requirements, emerging network technologies such as time-sensitive networking (TSN), edge computing (EC) and network slicing are introduced into the mobile network to improve network performance, which increase the complexity of the network operation and maintenance (O&M), as well as the network cost. As a result, operators urgently need new solutions to achieve low-cost and high-efficiency network SLA management. In this paper, a digital twin network (DTN) solution is innovatively proposed to achieve the mapping and full lifecycle management of the end-to-end physical network. All the network operation policies such as configuration and modification can be generated and verified inside the digital twin network first to make sure that the SLA requirements can be fulfilled without affecting the related network environment and the performance of the other network services, making network operation and maintenance more effective and accurate.