Wolfgang Kellerer has delivered an invited keynote presentation at the opening of the IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks (NFV-SDN 2025), which was held 10–12 November 2025 in Athens, Greece.
His talk entitled "Towards Network Digital Twins for AI-based Network Management" has summarized result on AI-based network management for softwarized networks and network function based architectures for future 6G communication systems.
Abstract: Modern fully softwarized communication systems promise almost unlimited flexibility, which is challenged by highly varying demands of emerging applications. This poses a variety of hard requirements to network operations and management. In this talk, the challenges of operating flexible communication networks will be motivated by mobile network function examples. Network digital twins are proposed as a solution concept towards next generation possibly autonomous network management. We show the role artificial intelligence and machine learning play in the creation and use of network digital twins and future network management. We illustrate our findings with examples from software-defined networking and kubernetes platforms.