Network-Wide Data Collection Based on In-Band Network Telemetry for Digital Twin Networks

Abstract

The Digital Twin Network (DTN) establishes a real-time virtual mirror of physical networks. Data collection plays an essential role in DTN, which collects the status data of physical network for building highly consistent digital twins. In this paper, we present a network-wide data collection scheme based on In-band Network Telemetry (INT). To build a lifelike mirror of the physical network, the probing path set is required to cover all links so that network topology, traffic load, and port-level device information is captured. We present a Latency-aware High-degree Replicated First (LHRF) vertex-cut graph partitioning algorithm to partition the network into several balanced subgraphs while trying to replicate the high-degree vertexes among partitions first. LHRF aims to balance the length and accumulated latency of the probing paths. With shorter and stabler probing latencies, the information received by digital twin can reflect the latest and consistent network-wide status. To prevent the packets from being fragmented due to overlong paths, a deep limited search (DLS) based path planning algorithm is employed to generate non-overlapped probing paths covering all edges in the separated subgraphs. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme generates more balanced INT paths with constrained path length and shorter, stabler probing delay.