Renato Ambrosone | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Optical Network Digital Twin -- Practical Use Cases and Architecture

With the widespread adoption of AI, machine-to-machine communications are rapidly increasing, reshaping the requirements for optical networks. Recent advances in Gaussian noise modeling for digital coherent transmission have raised expectations for digital-twin-based operation. However, unlike digital twins in wireless communication, which are already well established, significant barriers remain for commercialization in optical networks. This paper discusses the evolving requirements of optical networks in the AI era and proposes a practical Optical Network Digital Twin architecture enabling dynamic and Quality of Transmission aware operation beyond conventional management. Representative use cases, including operator-driven optimization, user-operator collaboration, and multi-operator interconnection, are presented, along with the architectural framework and key challenges toward practical deployment.

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arXiv2022

Experimental Demonstration of Partially Disaggregated Optical Network Control Using the Physical Layer Digital Twin

Optical communications and networking are fast becoming the solution to support ever-increasing data traffic across all segments of the network, expanding from core/metro networks to 5G/6G front-hauling. Therefore, optical networks need to evolve towards an efficient exploitation of the infrastructure by overcoming the closed and aggregated paradigm, to enable apparatus sharing together with the slicing and separation of the optical data plane from the optical control. In addition to the advantages in terms of efficiency and cost reduction, this evolution will increase the network reliability, also allowing for a fine trade-off between robustness and maximum capacity exploitation. In this work, an optical network architecture is presented based on the physical layer digital twin of the optical transport used within a multi-layer hierarchical control operated by an intent-based network operating system. An experimental proof of concept is performed on a three node network including up to 1000 km optical transmission, open re-configurable optical add & drop multiplexers (ROADMs) and white-box transponders hosting pluggable multi-rate transceivers. The proposed solution is based on GNPy as optical physical layer digital twin and ONOS as intent-based network operating system. The reliability of the optical control decoupled by the data plane functioning is experimentally demonstrated exploiting GNPy as open lightpath computation engine and software optical amplifier models derived from the component characterization. Besides the lightpath deployment exploiting the modulation format evaluation given a generic traffic request, the architecture reliability is tested mimicking the use case of an automatic failure recovery from a fiber cut.

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