The increased use of software in the operation and management of telecommunication networks has moved the industry one step closer to realizing autonomous network operation. One consequence of this shift is the significantly increased need for testing and validation before such 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 that the approach is feasible in automatically creating efficient digital twins with sufficient accuracy to be included as part of existing validation pipelines.

翻译：电信网络运营与管理中软件使用的日益增多，使行业向实现自主网络运营迈进了一步。这一转变带来的一个后果是，在此类软件部署前对测试与验证的需求显著增加。作为对现有基于仿真或硬件方法的补充，数字孪生为实现此类测试提供了环境；然而，其配置与执行需要大量时间和人力投入。本文探讨数字孪生的自动生成方法，旨在提供高效精准的验证工具，并与ITU-T自主网络架构的实验子系统相适配。我们通过初始用例的实验结果表明，该方法能够自动创建高效的数字孪生，其精度足以纳入现有验证流程，验证了该方案的可行性。