Subject: [nmrg] Qiao Xiang's support for adopting draft-zhou-nmrg-digitaltwin-network-concepts as an NMRG document

From: Qiao Xiang <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2021 12:32:18 +0800

Dear all,

My name is Qiao Xiang and I am a member of the ALTO WG. I have been
following some drafts in NMRG because they are related to network
information abstraction and exposure, which is exactly what ALTO focuses
on. I am writing to share some thoughts about the digital twin network
draft (draft-zhou-nmrg-digitaltwin-network-concepts),

Overall, I find this draft providing a clean view about the research topic
of digital twin network, in particular its goal, potential use cases and
key challneges. Digital twin network aims to provide a unified view
(including both configurations and network state) of the physical network,
and how to use this unified view to achieve automatic, intelligent and
intent-based network management of large networks such as DCN.

In this draft, a reference architecture is presented, which puts instances
of digital twin network into a middle layer between applications and the
physical networks. The 3-layer design has been adopted by many major IT
companies, such as Robotron in Facebook (in SIGCOMM'18), and MALT/Orion in
Google (in NSDI'20 and '21), to play a major role in simplifying their
daily network operations and management. But by putting digital twin
network into the middle layer, and letting it collect information from
physical networks, process and encode the collected information in
abstractions, and expose them to the applications, not only can we automate
the deep integration between network and application, but also we can let
applications to be able to fully utilize the huge amount of resources in
the network, to improve their performance. So personally, I think this
architecture is promising, and could shed light for many future research
opportunities in network management and automation.

To summarize, overall I find this draft trying to position digital twin
network as a major research direction to further improve the efficiency of
network management. It articulates the scientific soundness and the key
challenges of this direction, and provides a clean, promising reference
architecture that can motivate many future research. So IMHO, I would
advocate this draft being adopted by the NMRG.

Best
Qiao Xiang
-- 
Qiao Xiang
Professor, Xiamen University