A Network Digital Twin of a 5G Private Network: Designing a Proof-of-Concept from Theory to Practice

Network Digital Twins represent a key technology in future networks, expected to provide the capability to perform accurate analysis and predictions about the behaviour of 6G mobile networks. However, despite the availability of several theoretical works on the subject, still very few examples of actual implementations of Network Digital Twin are available. This paper provides a detailed description about the characteristics of Network Digital Twin and provides a practical example about real deployment of the technology. The considered network infrastructure is a real 5G private network running in a lab. The Network Digital Twin is built based on open source network emulation software and is available to the community as open source. Measurements on both the physical infrastructure and the related Digital Twin demonstrate a high accuracy in reproducing the state and behavior of the actual 5G system.