DANA: A Digital Agent for Network Data Acquisition in Network Digital Twin Context

Network Digital Twins (NDTs) require accurate, structured, and timely data from heterogeneous communication networks. However, many existing approaches assume that this information is already available and do not address the operational path needed to convert raw observations into deployable twin artifacts. This paper presents DANA, a lifecycle-aware data acquisition and transformation system for dedicated network devices and general-purpose systems hosting virtualized or containerized functions. Its key technical contribution is a unified workflow that coordinates centralized and distributed acquisition through a common, state-aware normalization layer. Each observation is associated with source, temporal, scenario, and lifecycle metadata, enabling the system to preserve the structural baseline used to construct the twin while processing runtime monitoring information separately. The normalized representation is decoupled from deployment-specific descriptor generation, while data and control exchanges follow a publish/subscribe communication model. The system is evaluated in two complementary controlled laboratory scenarios. The centralized workflow demonstrates accurate topology reconstruction and high agreement in network reachability, whereas the distributed workflow validates the complete path from host-level acquisition and normalization to descriptor generation and twin instantiation. Complementary local microbenchmarks characterize MQTT transport, fixed-load resource use, and stop/recovery event propagation to a test consumer while preserving the structural baseline. These results support the feasibility of the proposed workflow in the studied environments; large-scale operation and full synchronization of deployed NDTs require further experimental validation.