Digital Twin for Ultra-Reliable & Low-Latency 6G Wireless Communications in Dense Urban City

TL;DR

This paper develops a detailed geometric Digital Twin of Sunway City to evaluate 6G mmWave deployment performance, revealing coverage patterns, service reliability, and potential improvements for dense urban environments.

Contribution

It introduces a city-scale geometric Digital Twin for 6G planning, integrating ray tracing to assess service metrics and identify opportunities for enhancing ultra-reliable low-latency communications.

Findings

Favorable streets form narrow high-rate corridors surrounded by shadows.

Only 20% of the area can sustain 100 Mbps URLLC rates.

Most URLLC cells have several dB of SINR headroom for dual connectivity.

Abstract

High-frequency deployments in dense cities are difficult to plan because coverage, interference, and service reliability depend sensitively on local morphology. This paper develops a geometric Digital Twin (DT) of the Sunway City and uses it to study the service implications of a multi-site mmWave deployment. The DT is constructed from geo-referenced three-dimensional meshes of buildings, roads, and open areas, assembled in Blender and exported as a mesh scene. A seven-transmitter downlink at 10 GHz is then embedded into this geometry and evaluated using a GPU accelerated ray tracing engine that returns path-gain and Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR) fields over a dense grid of user locations. These fields are mapped to achievable throughput and compared against representative target rates for immersive extended reality (XR), vehicle-to-everything (V2X) services, and ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC). The resulting maps show that favourable streets and courtyards form narrow high rate corridors surrounded by deep shadows, even within a dense area. In the baseline deployment, one fifth of the simulated area can maintain 100 Mbps URLLC rates, and less than 10% of cells can reach 1.7 Gbps for XR, despite the presence of several rooftop sites. By exploiting the DT, we further quantify the macro-diversity margin between the best and second best serving sites and show that most URLLC-feasible cells have several decibels of SINR headroom that could be harvested through dual connectivity. The study shows how a city DT can translate ray tracing output into service centric metrics and planning insights, complementing both analytical models and expensive measurement campaigns.