Intelligent Digital Twin Communication Framework for Addressing Accuracy and Timeliness Tradeoff in Resource-Constrained Networks

Abstract

The accuracy and timeliness tradeoff prevents Digital Twins (DTs) from realizing their full potential. High accuracy is crucial for decision-making, and timeliness is equally essential for responsiveness. Therefore, this tradeoff in DT communication must be addressed to achieve DT synchronization. Previous studies identified the issue but considered the problem as maximizing data transfer, which is infeasible due to resource constraints. To facilitate this, we quantify accuracy and timeliness as E and $\phi $ and define the problem as joint minimisation. We then introduce the Intelligent DT Communication (IDTC) Framework to solve the problem, which includes machine learning-based Predictive Synchronization (PS) and DT synchronization management (DTSYNC) protocol. Here, PS uses imputation and forecasting to generate future values, which are utilized to update DT at the projected time points. This mechanism of PS enables lowering E and $\phi $ of the communication. Subsequently, we utilize the DTSYNC to control synchronization and optimise the twining frequency $f_{t}$ . We evaluate the proposed framework using a public dataset and compare its performance with several state-of-the-art studies in a real-world scenario. Evaluation results indicate that IDTC outperforms the existing methods by 80% for E and 84% for $\phi $ while enabling $f_{t}$ adjustment, resulting in 3.8 times goodput improvement.