Better Together: Leveraging Multiple Digital Twins for Deployment Optimization of Airborne Base Stations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a digital twin-guided approach for optimizing the deployment of airborne base stations using UAVs, integrating two open-source digital twins for high-fidelity evaluation and rapid location convergence.

Contribution

It presents a novel interactive software bridge between two digital twins and a back-propagation algorithm for UAV placement, enhancing deployment efficiency and environmental adaptability.

Findings

High fidelity evaluation across digital twins

Rapid convergence of UAV placement using back-propagation

Identification of environmental conditions affecting twin performance

Abstract

Airborne Base Stations (ABSs) allow for flexible geographical allocation of network resources with dynamically changing load as well as rapid deployment of alternate connectivity solutions during natural disasters. Since the radio infrastructure is carried by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with limited flight time, it is important to establish the best location for the ABS without exhaustive field trials. This paper proposes a digital twin (DT)-guided approach to achieve this through the following key contributions: (i) Implementation of an interactive software bridge between two open-source DTs such that the same scene is evaluated with high fidelity across NVIDIA's Sionna and Aerial Omniverse Digital Twin (AODT), highlighting the unique features of each of these platforms for this allocation problem, (ii) Design of a back-propagation-based algorithm in Sionna for rapidly converging on the physical location of the UAVs, orientation of the antennas and transmit power to ensure efficient coverage across the swarm of the UAVs, and (iii) numerical evaluation in AODT for large network scenarios (50 UEs, 10 ABS) that identifies the environmental conditions in which there is agreement or divergence of performance results between these twins. Finally, (iv) we propose a resilience mechanism to provide consistent coverage to mission-critical devices and demonstrate a use case for bi-directional flow of information between the two DTs.