Digital twin network operations can ease the burden of OAM in the 5G era

What? The Digital Twin for Network Operations Catalyst project seeks to make 5G network operations, administration, and management (OAM) more efficient with a tri-level digital twin network solution.

Who’s involved? China Mobile, Vodafone, Huawei, ZTE, Inspur, and China Unitech

Commercial context

As the power and speed of cellular networks continues to grow swiftly with global deployments of 5G – and increasingly the capabilities of enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (URLLC), and massive machine-type communications (MMTC) – so too do end users’ expectations for sophisticated connected experiences as standard. While this marks a period of major commercial opportunities for communications service providers (CSPs) to grow new business in computing networks, the challenge in meeting that ambition is also considerable – with far higher requirements for OAM in the move towards ultra-complex autonomous networks.

The solution

The Digital Twin for Network Operations Catalyst has created a tri-level digital twin network solution to address this, with visible physical resources, operation status and computing force network services – enabling the digital presentation of physical networks to enhance the accuracy of network resource management, improve operation and maintenance efficiency, and expand customer engagement to support self-service. This digital twin solution is based on comprehensive perception intelligence and dynamic twin modelling to build a mirror image of the physical network – helping to improve risk discovery and network service quality while providing fully visual, customizable and iterative service pre-verification and simulation capabilities.

The solution is targeted at two application scenarios: One for OAM engineers, and one for business customers of CSPs. For OAM engineers the focus is on fine management of ultra-large and complex network resources and real-time dynamic network monitoring – including new approaches to visual management of spatial and geographic resources, real-time visualization of dynamic complex network states, and visualized OAM through cross-layer network correlation. For business customers, the new capabilities are based on integrated scheduling of computing and network resources with visualized self-service, including optimal utilization of computing network resources, self-service and self-OAM, as well as personalized solution and customization.

The project comprises two phases: The first has been on verifying feasibility and the value of global data, and topo-associated visualization the physical layer to the twin layer. The second phase explores configuration verification, and new service and products verification in the twin network layer based on the first phase's capabilities, to realize closed-loop control between the physical layer and the twin layer.

Pilot applications

To demonstrate the readiness of Application 1 (for OAM engineers), China Mobile Henan and China Mobile Zhejiang applied the solution in their core networks, performing automatic simulation evaluation to identify bottlenecks, guide capacity expansion and target parameter adjustments. Network exceptions can now be quickly detected and handled, with disaster recovery (DR) switchover if required, and algorithmic intelligent optimization of flow control parameters can be achieved within 5 minutes, ensuring smooth core network switchover.

The proof-of-concept for Application 2 (for business customers) focused on transport use cases. China Mobile Guangdong and Huawei completed service profiles for seven automobile enterprises and two million vehicles based on twin network data – establishing an Internet of Vehicles visualization system, and creating a quality support system for core services such as vehicle information reporting, remote wake-up, remote rescue, and remote upgrade, and enabling in-vehicle entertainment. The automotive enterprises involved saw improvement in their traffic operation efficiency of 12%, compute first networking (CFN) resource utilization of 17%, and operation and maintenance (O&M) costs reduced by 21%.

Value to the wider industry

The team – comprising members from China Mobile, Vodafone, Huawei, ZTE, Inspur, and China Unitech – have therefore been able to contribute to the TM Forum Open APIs (application programming interfaces): The Transport Network Topo API, the Transport Network Service API, and the Transport Capacity Map API.

“All the use cases have now been proven to be ready for large-scale commercial deployment through pilot application at China Mobile,” explains Kaixi Liu, Project Manager at China Mobile. “Through pilots of different use cases we hope that, through this project, we will encourage other operators in the industry to invest more in the application and development of digital twin network technology – helping accelerate technological innovation, scheme development, new business research and the development of digital twin networks in reverse.”