Microservice-based Network Digital Twins: A Slicing Approach

The Network Digital Twins (NDTs) have become a frontier thanks to their real-time monitoring, analysis, prediction, and optimisation capabilities. However, their architecture has not been designed for the scale of next-generation networks that will ensure ubiquitous connectivity. At this, different NDT applications may require distinct levels of quality of service requirements to be met. With increasing size and heterogeneity in the networks, the processing load at the NDTs escalates, and these requirements may not be met. Therefore, we propose a microservice-based architecture with application-oriented slicing. Here, we present the scaling methodology, which enables scaling at both microservice and slice levels. Then, we evaluate the throughput, delay, and quality of service requirement violation rate metrics under two scenarios. Thanks to the slicing approach with microservice-based implementation, the end-to-end delay and the QoS requirement violation rate are reduced while having higher throughput performance.