Building a Low-cost Network Digital Twin for the IoT-Edge-Cloud Continuum Using Open-Source Tooling

abstract

Validating network configurations and testing failure scenarios in IoT-edge-cloud environments without disrupting live infrastructure remains an open operational challenge. This paper presents a low-cost, fully open-source Network Digital Twin (NDT) for IIoT edge deployments, built on Containerlab, Open vSwitch, ONOS, and a Prometheus and Grafana observability stack. The framework integrates container-native topology emulation, SDN-driven traffic engineering, and real-time telemetry in a single deployable artefact. Validation against a physical Raspberry Pi edge WLAN shows strong distributional convergence on RTT median and UDP throughput. Remaining divergences on TCP throughput and packet loss are attributed to identifiable virtualisation artefacts, with root causes and remediation paths provided.