Last June, the annual meeting of European National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), was held in Terena Networking Conference (TNC) 2024 in Rennes, France. This event brought together industry leaders and professionals to discuss the latest novelty in the optical network field. This presentation, titled “Future Automation and Digital Twins session”, is the result of a long collaboration with GARR, the Italian NREN. GARR manages the optical network of Italian research and has always shown interest in testing GNPy in its infrastructure.
In today’s fast-evolving telecommunications industry, the demand for robust and scalable optical networks is at an all-time high. As operators work to address growing bandwidth requirements, they need tools that optimize network designs and enhance performance. GNPy, a Python-based software developed in the PSE Subgroup (PSE) of the Open Optical & Packet Transport (OOPT) Project Group at Telecom Infra Project (TIP), is a powerful solution designed to meet these challenges. Initially created for optical network planning, GNPy also offers valuable insights by enabling professionals to evaluate and compare network performance with precision. Its vendor-neutral physical model, designed for multi-vendor infrastructure, allows operators to simulate and validate network behavior across different components, paving the way for more informed decision-making.
Key Features:
- Vendor-agnostic physical model: Simulates network components based on universal standards.
- Accurate performance evaluation: Assesses transmission quality through GSNR.
- Multi-vendor support: Validates network plans from diverse vendors.
Benefits:
- Optimized performance: Enhances network reliability through data-driven insights.
- Improved scalability: Facilitates seamless multi-vendor network planning.
- Cost efficiency: Reduces integration complexities by validating solutions before implementation.
Also thanks to the collaboration with the PSE Subgroup, we were able to test and validate GNPy in GARR’s laboratory, mirroring the production network. This was an important result since these are commercial devices, and we were able to use GNPy without further measurements thanks to the data provided by the manufacturer.
The talk at the event was held together with Matteo Colantonio, from GARR, and was titled ‘Empowering Optical Network Teams Through Digital Twins: A Case Study on Implementing and Utilizing GNPy’, focused on the challenges introduced by digital twin build in the optical networks.
The audience’s interest in GNPy has become clear since last year’s presentation during TNC 2023 in Albania. For this reason, we decided to keep the presentation more like a tutorial: in the first part of the presentation, we gave an introduction to the concept of digital twin and GSNR. The audience was quite diverse and for this reason we kept the first part simple. The second part was held by Matteo, who focused on the needs of an operator to implement GNPy in their network and presented the result for the GARR’s setup.
The video recording can be found here (from min 53:00).
What feedback did we get? Last year, questions suggested that GNPy was perceived as a magic tool, so this year, we focused on explaining what kind of data GNPy needs to be fed to get GSNR values.
The types of questions we received this year were much more practical, such as, “What do I need to install?” “How do I send data?” etc. This suggests that the GNPY user guide, also developed in the PSE Subgroup, has room for improvement. A step-by-step guide can be useful for everyone approaching GNPy for the first time.
Perhaps the greatest feedback comes directly from the development done with GARR: during the tests, most of the complications came from the difficulty of compiling the topology and the equipment information to feed into GNPy. This was the major push to resume the work both on the REST interfaces so as to be able to use GNPy without the need to write code, but also on the YANG data models so as to be able to have an explicit validation of the data fed to GNPy.
Did GEANT like the idea of using a digital twin of their network? It’s now a 1.3 million euro project that has just been funded.
The TNC 2024 session on GNPy and digital twins highlighted the transformative potential of this technology for optimizing optical networks, particularly in multi-vendor environments. The collaboration with GARR and the practical feedback from the audience have paved the way for further improvements in GNPy’s usability and application. As evidenced by the newly funded GEANT project, the integration of digital twins into network planning is no longer just a concept but a rapidly advancing reality, promising significant operational benefits for NRENs and the broader telecommunications industry.