Native Design for 6G Digital Twin Network: Use Cases, Architecture, Functions, and Key Technologies

The massive scale of deployment, hundreds of parameters, differentiated scenarios and interworking with existing mobile networks leads to high complexity and high cost of optimization, operation and maintenance of the 5th generation mobile network (5G), which inspires that 6th generation mobile network (6G) should support high level autonomy at the beginning of deployment. Digital twin network (DTN) technology, with its advantages of intelligent decision making, low-cost experimentation, and preverification, has emerged as a key enabling technology for autonomous network. To address the need for flexibility to fulfill more diverse scenarios and high-level autonomy toward 2030, this article discusses the typical usage cases of DTN, and proposes an innovative and native design for 6G DTN, encompassing logical framework, architecture, functions, and deployment modes. Furthermore, the efficient DTN Model Construction and Intelligent Orchestration and Management are introduced to enable fully automated and high-performance DTN tasks. Finally, the future direction for DTN research is presented.