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+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 (delta = 0.4 ms) and UDP throughput (delta = 0.03 Mbps). Remaining divergences on TCP throughput and packet loss are attributed to identifiable virtualisation artefacts, with root causes and remediation paths provided.