Digital Twin Manager: A Novel Framework to Handle Conflicting Network Applications

In recent years, a higher number of emerging network applications boosted the adoption of new managing technology, like Digital Twin (DT). Also in networking scope, DT starts to be largely considered to model network behaviours to efficiently manage their resources. DT can be exploited to find optimal solutions, even in context where disjoint objectives are envisaged. For instance, this is the case of network application handled by an SDN Controller that pursue possibly conflicting goals. Nowadays, SDN Controller has no feature to manage this kind of contentions. This paper proposes a novel module, called Digital Twin Manager, that aims at evaluating the effects of operational changes provided by concurrent network applications by means of a Digital Twin Network, i.e., an interconnection of several DTs. DT Manager updates the digital network status in real-time and evaluates the feedback information provided by the digital applications. The proof-of-concept shows the feasibility of the proposed solution.