Optimizing Wireless Networks With Digital Twins
ECE Principal Research Scientist Pedram Johari and William Lincoln Smith Professor Tommaso Melodia received the Best Paper Award for “TwiNet: Connecting Real World Networks to Their Digital Twins Through a Live Bidirectional Link” at the 2024 IEEE Global Communications Conference.
Abstract:
The wireless spectrum’s increasing complexity poses challenges and opportunities, highlighting the necessity for real-time solutions and robust data processing capabilities. Digital Twin (DT), virtual replicas of physical systems, integrate real-time data to mirror their real-world counterparts, enabling precise monitoring and optimization. Incorporating DTs into wireless communication enhances predictive maintenance, resource allocation, and troubleshooting, thus bolstering network reliability. Our paper introduces TwiNet, enabling bidirectional, near-realtime links between real-world wireless spectrum scenarios and DT replicas. Utilizing the protocol, MQTT, we can achieve data transfer times with an average latency of 14 ms, suitable for real-time communication. This is confirmed by monitoring real-world traffic and mirroring it in real-time within the DT’s wireless environment. We evaluate TwiNet’s performance in two use cases: (i) assessing risky traffic configurations of UEs in a Safe Adaptive Data Rate (SADR) system, improving network performance by approximately 15% compared to original network selections; and (ii) deploying new CNNs in response to jammed pilots, achieving up to 97% accuracy training on artificial data and deploying a new model in as low as 2 minutes to counter persistent adversaries. TwiNet enables swift deployment and adaptation of DTs, addressing crucial challenges in modern wireless communication systems.