Digital Twin as a Service for Network Infrastructure Management

The telecommunications industry face escalating demands for seamless connectivity, impeccable service quality, and uninterrupted network performance. Alongside network observability, to meet these demands, network administrators can leverage digital twins to simulate network configurations, test and validate deployment scenarios and their impacts. Digital Twin as a Service (DTaaS) abstracts the complexity of heterogeneous networks, providing a unified platform for visualizing and managing synchronized representations of diverse devices, protocols, and technologies. DTaaS platforms facilitate integrations for ingesting, processing, and analayzing various data formats originating from different network device vendors to enrich digital twins with historical, real-time insights and forecasts. Furthermore, network monitoring, configuration and automation workflows can be enhanced by providing a sandbox environment for experimentation and validation. Here, as networks grow in size and complexity, twinning becomes increasingly challenging due to scalability limitations and computational resource constraints. Scaling digital twins to accommodate large-scale networks requires efficient data structures tailored for network observability, optimized ingestion and distributed computing architectures.

In these circumstances, this Ph.D. study will research the performance metrics and real-time telemetry data of network device digital twins at rest and in transit with a focus on data pipeline, storage and computation architecture, and communication protocols. To support the real-time requirements of DT, the data pipeline segment will include exploring data compression techniques, hierarchical data representations, and indexing schemes to minimize memory footprint and enhance data retrieval efficiency. Storage and computing architecture will include designing a distributed and automated testbed tailored for parallelizing digital twinned network simulations across multiple nodes or clusters. This involves researching distributed processing frameworks, communication protocols, and fault-tolerant mechanisms to enable seamless scalability and fault-tolerance in large-scale digital twin deployments.

Perspective applicants are encouraged to contact the Supervisor before submitting their applications. Applications should make it clear the project you are applying for and the name of the supervisors.

Academic qualifications

A first degree (at least a 2.1) ideally in Electrical and Computer Engineering, with a good fundamental knowledge of Containerization and Container Orchestration, Network Simulation tools like Containerlab and EVE-NG, and programming languages like Python or Go

English language requirement

IELTS score must be at least 6.5 (with not less than 6.0 in each of the four components). Other, equivalent qualifications will be accepted. Full details of the University’s policy are available online.

Essential attributes

• Experience of fundamental Software Engineering
• Competent in Algorithmic Design, Communication Technology
• Knowledge of Simulation Environments, Data Management, Network Topology and Digital Twins 
• Good written and oral communication skills
• Strong motivation, with evidence of independent research skills relevant to the project
• Good time management

Desirable attributes

• Real-Time Software Services
• Network Devices
• Distributed Systems

Application process

For informal enquiries about this PhD project, please contact Professor Berk Canberk, [email protected]

The application must include: 

Research project outline of 2 pages (list of references excluded). The outline may provide details about

• Background and motivation, explaining the importance of the project, should be supported also by relevant literature. You can also discuss the applications you expect for the project results.
• Research questions or
• Methodology: types of data to be used, approach to data collection, and data analysis methods.
• List of references

The outline must be created solely by the applicant. Supervisors can only offer general discussions about the project idea without providing any additional support.

• Statement no longer than 1 page describing your motivations and fit with the project.
• Recent and complete curriculum vitae. The curriculum must include a declaration regarding the English language qualifications of the candidate.
• Supporting documents will have to be submitted by successful candidates.
• Two academic references (but if you have been out of education for more than three years, you may submit one academic and one professional reference), on the form can be downloaded here.

Applications can be submitted here.