Digital Twin-Empowered Routing Management for Reliable Multi-Hop Millimeter Wave V2X

TL;DR

This paper introduces a digital twin system for managing multi-hop routing in millimeter wave V2X communications, significantly enhancing reliability in connected vehicle networks through simulation-based evaluation.

Contribution

It proposes a novel DT-based routing management system with algorithms that incorporate future trajectory prediction, improving reliability over conventional methods.

Findings

DT-based algorithms outperform traditional routing in reliability.

Simulation results show improvements in both connected and mixed traffic scenarios.

The system effectively monitors and manages CAVs in real-time using Unity-based simulation.

Abstract

Digital twin (DT) technology can replicate physical entities in cyberspace. A mobility DT digitalizes connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) and their surrounding traffic environment, allowing to monitor the maneuvering and distribution of CAVs in real-time, which is crucial for managing vehicle-to-everything (V2X) connectivity, especially when millimeter wave (mmWave) is adopted. MmWave V2X relies on dynamic multi-hop communications to ensure high reliability. Therefore, in this paper, the challenges of mmWave V2X are presented to motivate the utilization of DT, and then we introduce the system model for DT-based multi-hop routing management, incorporating two different routing algorithms: with and without future trajectory prediction. For proof of concept, we implement the proposed DT system using Unity-based AWSIM and evaluate the proposed algorithms via simulations. The results show that, compared to the conventional routing algorithm in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), the DT-based algorithms significantly improve the reliability of mmWave V2X, and such improvements can be seen in both fully connected and mixed traffic scenarios.