• A Hybrid Conference – In-Person and Virtual Presentations
  • Technical Conference:  24 – 28 March 2024
  • Exhibition: 26 – 28 March 2024
  • San Diego Convention Center, San Diego, California, USA

The Role of Digital Twins in Optical Networking

Room: TBD

A digital twin creates a virtual model of a physical system to understand it, predict its evolution, and optimize it while it operates. Digital twins are receiving increasing attention and have been used in a wide range of fields, i.e., from the manufacturing industry to electrical power systems and from aerospace engineering to smart cities, to name a few.

With the proliferation of elastic and programmable optical transceivers, high-order modulation formats, flexible grids, and intelligent orchestration layers, optical networks are rapidly evolving in the direction of openness and disaggregation, flexible transmission, function virtualization, and further automation/autonomy. Typically, optical networks are operated rather statically, while the increase in complexity and flexibility hinders their dynamic and automated adaptation.

This panel aims to present state-of-the-art research activities on the vital role that digital twins can play in alleviating the plethora of challenges inherent in designing and operating complex single-vendor or disaggregated optical networks. Digital twins have the potential to bridge the gap between the network management/control, and the actual physical system, providing a means to understand, predict, and evaluate the behavior and performance of the network as it operates.

Topics to be targeted by the panel include but will not be limited to:

  • Fault prediction, detection, identification and localization
  • Evaluation of fault mitigation actions
  • Evaluation of what-if scenarios for channel and network optimization
  • Physical layer (evolution) emulation and QoT estimation
  • Evaluation, processing, and understanding of the effects of dynamic actions on the physical layer • Application to optical transport networks and Industry 4.0

Organizers

Juthika Basak, Nokia, USA

James Chien, Marvell Technology Inc, USA

Stephan Pachnicke, Christian-Albrechts Universität zu Kiel, Germany