Digital Twin-Assisted Resilient Planning for mmWave IAB Networks via Graph Attention Networks

Abstract: Digital Twin (DT) technology enables real-time monitoring and optimization of complex network infrastructures by creating accurate virtual replicas of physical systems. In millimeter-wave (mmWave) 5G/6G networks, the deployment of Integrated Access and Backhaul (IAB) nodes faces highly dynamic urban environments, necessitating intelligent DT-enabled optimization frameworks. Traditional IAB deployment optimization approaches struggle with the combinatorial complexity of jointly optimizing coverage, connectivity, and resilience, often leading to suboptimal solutions that are vulnerable to network disruptions. With this consideration, we propose a novel Graph Attention Network v2 (GATv2)-based reinforcement learning approach for resilient IAB deployment in urban mmWave networks. Specifically, we formulate the deployment problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) with explicit resilience constraints and employ edge-conditioned GATv2 to capture complex spatial dependencies between heterogeneous node types and dynamic connectivity patterns. The attention mechanism enables the model to focus on critical deployment locations to maximize coverage and ensure fault tolerance through redundant backhaul connections. To address the inherent vulnerability of mmWave links, we train the GATv2 policy using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) with a carefully designed balance between coverage, cost, and resilience. Comprehensive simulations across three urban scenarios demonstrate that our method achieves 98.5-98.7 percent coverage with 14.3-26.7 percent fewer nodes than baseline approaches, while maintaining 87.1 percent coverage retention under 30 percent link failures, representing 11.3-15.4 percent improvement in fault tolerance compared to state-of-the-art methods.