Abstract
The increased use of software in the operation and management of telecommunication networks has moved the industry one step closer to realizing autonomous operation of the network. One consequence of this is the significantly increased the need for testing and validation before this software can be deployed. Complementing existing simulation or hardware-based approaches, digital twins present an environment to achieve this testing, however, they require significant time and human effort to configure and execute. This paper explores the automatic generation of digital twins to provide efficient and accurate validation tools, aligned to the ITU-T autonomous network architecture’s experimentation subsystem. We present experimental results for an initial use case demonstrating the approach feasible in automatically creating efficient digital twins, with sufficient accuracy when included as part of existing validation pipelines.