Digital Twins From a Networking Perspective

Digital twin (DT) has attracted a lot of attention from both industry and academia since it was proposed over a decade ago. A DT can be viewed as a virtual implementation of a real physical system (PS) and used as a representation of the PS for various applications. Despite the great potential of DTs in various fields, implementing DTs to obtain the desired functionality is not always straightforward. Specifically, accurate real-time synchronization between the features at a PS and its DT is essential for the DT to represent the PS. In this case, appropriate networking support is a key component to enable future DT development and applications. Currently, the research on DTs from a networking standpoint is still at an early stage, and only limited work has been done on DT implementation in practical systems. To fill this gap, this article investigates networking-related issues for DTs. Based on the existing literature, a feature-based method is provided for describing the desired properties and quality of DTs from the networking perspective. A stage-based implementation framework is presented for creating large-scale DTs for complex PSs by considering various networking constraints. Networking-related challenging issues and open research topics are discussed at the end.