Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being incorporated in several optimization, scheduling, orchestration as well as in native communication network functions. This paradigm shift results in increased energy consumption, however, quantifying the end-to-end energy consumption of adding intelligence to communication systems remains an open challenge since conventional energy consumption metrics focus on either communication, computation infrastructure, or model development. To address this, we propose a new metric, the Energy Cost of AI Lifecycle (eCAL) of an AI model in a system. eCAL captures the energy consumption throughout the development, deployment and utilization of an AI-model providing intelligence in a communication network by (i) analyzing the complexity of data collection and manipulation in individual components and (ii) deriving overall and per-bit energy consumption. We show that as a trained AI model is used more frequently for inference, its energy cost per inference decreases, since the fixed training energy is amortized over a growing number of inferences. For a simple case study we show that eCAL for 100 inferences is 2.73 times higher than for 1000 inferences. Additionally, we have developed a modular and extendable opensource simulation tool to enable researchers, practitioners, and engineers to calculate the end-to-end energy cost with various configurations and across various systems, ensuring adaptability to diverse use cases.

The shift towards software-centric network infrastructures is driven by the increasing need for networks to be responsive, flexible, and scalable in the face of an expanding set of connected devices. The digital twin (DT) approach, mirroring physical entities in a digital format, has emerged as a key enabler of network reliability and availability. Incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into DTs enhances the resilience of networks by providing in-depth analysis and increasingly automated mitigation strategies against operational disruptions. In this work, we propose a new AI-based information extraction module that is part of the DT Monitoring component able to process RSS data, extract and characterize abrupt anomalies. The output of this component is used to maintain an anomaly history in the Link Abstraction within the DT and subsequently inform possible automatic mitigation actions. We design the AI-based information extraction module to identify and characterize three types of RSS based anomalies. Our extensive performance analysis on 10 versions of the “You Only Look Once” architecture reveals that YOLOv8n produces a good tradeoff between performance and computational complexity. We show that our approach performs on par with the state of the art for anomaly detection, while enabling anomaly characterization by location, duration, and severity. By employing two SotA explainability algorithms, we also provide insights into the important regions of the input that trigger the selected model’s classification and characterization decisions.