GP-INT: Generating Balanced Network-Wide In-Band Telemetry Path for Digital Twin Networks

The Digital Twin Network creates a real-time virtual reflection of the physical network, providing a valuable experimentation and verification platform. To achieve high-fidelity reconstruction of the physical network, adopting a comprehensive, efficient, and high-precision data collection method is necessary. This paper presents a network-wide data collection scheme based on In-band Network Telemetry (INT). However, covering the entire network with a single probing path can result in unnecessarily lengthy paths, while using paths with too large deviation reduces collecting efficiency. Based on graph Community Detection (CD), we propose Graph Partition-based INT (GP-INT) to address these issues to create balanced sub-graphs of network topology. To avoid packet fragmentation due to excessively long paths, a path planning algorithm based on Deep Limited Search (DLS) is further introduced to generate probing paths in separated subgraphs. The proposed scheme is then implemented in P4-defined switches. Simulation results indicate the scheme produces a more balanced and less redundant set of multiple probing paths for network-wide data collection across various network structures.