Redefining Digital Twins as Predictive Decision Engines for AI-Native Wireless Networks

Abstract

Future artificial intelligence (AI)-native 6G networks require wireless systems that move beyond reactive optimization toward autonomous, predictive, and continuously adaptive intelligence. Most existing digital twin (DT) frameworks use AI only to improve modeling, data generation, or isolated optimization tasks, leaving the DT itself in a passive, synchronization-only role. This article redefines the DT as a predictive decision engine, which is model-agnostic framework that fuses continuous synchronization, predictive reasoning, autonomous decision-making, and closed-loop wireless control into a single system. Reasoning over synchronized network state, the framework anticipates future conditions and acts autonomously before performance degrades, using generative adversarial networks (GANs), large language models (LLMs), diffusion models, or other learning-based engines interchangeably as the underlying predictor. An illustrative unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted non-terrestrial network (NTN) deployment, using a lightweight conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) as one illustrative predictor, demonstrates the practical effectiveness of the proposed framework by achieving considerable energy savings over reactive baselines while maintaining reliable quality of service (QoS) under highly dynamic conditions.