At MWC25, VIAVI’s Chris Murphy explored how intelligent digital twins are reshaping telecom network management. Digital twins create a real-time, virtual model of a network, allowing operators to predict issues, optimize performance, and test configurations before making changes. Murphy highlighted their growing role in energy efficiency and teleoperated driving, showcasing the technology’s potential beyond traditional network management.
Looking ahead to 6G, VIAVI is leveraging its expertise in both lab and field environments to develop hybrid testbeds that combine digital twins with physical network testing. By integrating real-world network data, these models help drive research and innovation for next-generation connectivity. With digital twins reducing risk and enhancing efficiency, the future of telecom is smarter and more predictive than ever. Want to see how this technology is revolutionizing networks? Watch the full interview now.
Dan Jones:
What is a digital twin?
Chris Murphy:
A digital twin is a replica of an entity, a physical entity in a model where we can ask questions of that model and see what might be the case in that real physical system. So, what does that mean in reality? Well, we can create a digital twin of a communication network and we can use that to understand how we can optimize that network, how resilient that network is to possible impairments and what might happen to that network in the future. It's a very powerful enabler for lab applications, as well as in the field and operational networks.
Dan Jones:
So, who actually uses them in the field?
Chris Murphy:
At the moment, there are some applications in the field. We're part of a Horizon Europe project where we're looking at how we can build a digital twin, which is appropriate to put into an operational network, to support various use cases. The use cases we're looking at there are for energy optimization, as well as teleoperated driving. So, that's still in the research stage and we're working with a number of European partners on that.
But when we put a digital twin into the operational network, it's quite a powerful enabler, because when you can ask your digital twin what would happen if this change were made, then you can spot possible side effects of an adverse change. If an intelligent application wants to make a change to your network, you can test it on the digital twin and see if it's got any unwanted side effects and veto it accordingly. But it can also play a role in arbitrating between conflicts, between different agents wanting to do different things, and it can also be used as an optimizer. If you can test a hypothesis many times about changes to the network, you can find a more optimal configuration and drive up the performance.
Dan Jones:
So, what are the key components of a digital twin network?
Chris Murphy:
Great question. Well, clearly to build a digital twin, we need that model, that thing which is able to answer the question, what would happen in this scenario? What will happen in that situation? But that's not all we need to build a digital twin, because we need to make that reflect reality, we need to have that closed loop to the physical entity. So we need to be able to understand where the sites are located, we need to understand how they're configured, and the configuration can change over time.
We need to understand the configuration of the various network intelligence, which is optimizing the network. We need to understand the radio propagation environments. What are the channel conditions like? How is that changing over time? And we need to understand how the subscribers are using the network. What services do they want? Where do they want them? How are they moving around? How fast? What are their characteristics? So we understand that stimulus on the network. Ideally we want this as low latency as possible. The faster we can reflect in the model what is happening in reality, then the more use cases we can address with a digital twin.
Dan Jones:
So, how does VIAVI fit into all of this, particularly as we look ahead to things like 6G?
Chris Murphy:
So, there's quite a number of ways we fit into this. I think we're uniquely positioned, because we have a strong lab presence, but we also have a strong presence in the field and the operational networks, 'cause we can collect data from the live networks, understand how the networks are performing, how they're trying to be used by the subscribers. That gives us a lot of raw data we can put into the digital twins.
So that's part of it, but there's also the aspects of bringing that reality into the lab. That means that our customers can start to test their 6G evolutions, drive their research into what's going to be the new technologies in 6G based on replicas which are inspired by the realities of the networks that exist today. We're part of a project that's just started. It's another Horizon project called 6G-DALI, which is, again, a consortium of universities and other vendors and other partners.
What we're doing is we're building a hybrid federated testbed. So there are physical testbeds, but there's also digital twins and between them ... so physical testbeds have their own strength, digital twins have their own unique strength as well, and together they make a very potent research enabler for developing those technologies for 6G. So, I'm very excited to be seeing how that develops over the next three years.