Communication is essential in the digital age we live in. Increasingly, people and organizations rely on wireless communication for their daily activities. As such, there is a continuous quest to design better and more capable wireless communication systems. For instance, Wi-Fi has now reached its 6th generation. Also, alternative communication solutions appear for e.g. IoT applications. Along with this quest come more and more features and control knobs, and thus an increasing complexity to properly manage and troubleshoot such networks. Today’s solutions fall short either in completeness or complexity to generate insights in or suggest optimizations of these complex wireless systems.

In this research project, a radically different approach will be taken by building a data-driven, multi-faceted digital communication twin of a physical network. This virtual model will be data-driven, taking advantage of recent monitoring techniques to collect relevant network data required for maintaining the model. Further, it will combine several novel techniques in order to become an accurate representation of the real network, whilst bounding its computational complexity. By doing so, it is the project’s ambition to have a virtual counterpart of the real network that is able to quickly provide insights in the performance of the network. Moreover, copies of the model can be used to explore alternative, better network configurations. A new paradigm for network management is coming!