Real-time digital twins:
Vision and research directions for 6G and beyond
IEEE Communications Magazine
Ahmed Alkhateeb, Shuaifeng Jiang, and Gouranga Charan
Wireless Intelligence Lab, Arizona State University, USA
Abstract
This article presents a vision where real-time digital twins of the physical wireless environments are continuously updated using multi-modal sensing data from the distributed infrastructure and user devices, and are used to make communication and sensing decisions. This vision is mainly enabled by advances in precise 3D maps, multi-modal sensing, ray-tracing computations, and machine/deep learning. This article details this vision, explains the different approaches for constructing and utilizing these real-time digital twins, discusses the applications and open problems, and presents a research platform that can be used to investigate various digital twin research directions.
Fig. 1. This figure illustrates the general idea of the digital twin with the four key enablers: precise 3D map, high-fidelity sensing, real-time ray tracing, and ML/DL. The digital twin can simulate wireless propagation and infer channel information.
Operation Modes and Applications
Fig. 2. This figure illustrates three operating modes of the digital twin system: (i) local information and individual decision, (ii) shared information and individual decision, and (iii) shared information and joint/cooperative decision.
Fig. 3. This figure illustrates the example communication applications that digital twins can facilitate across various layers. For example, in the access layer, the digital twin can proactively predict blockages and initiate hand-off.
Results
Fig. 4. Top-2 accuracy obtained by training the NN on the synthetic data generated by the digital twin and/or the real-world data.
Citation
If you found our project inspiring, please cite the following paper:
Ahmed Alkhateeb, Shuaifeng Jiang, and Gouranga Charan, ‘‘Real-time digital twins: Vision and research directions for 6G and beyond,’’ IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 61, no. 11, pp. 128–134, Nov. 2023.
@article{alkhateeb2023real,
title={Real-time digital twins: Vision and research directions for 6G and beyond},
author={Alkhateeb, Ahmed and Jiang, Shuaifeng and Charan, Gouranga},
journal={IEEE Communications Magazine},
volume={61},
number={11},
pages={128–134},
year={2023},
publisher={IEEE}
}