Network Digital Twin for the Industrial Internet of Things

Abstract

Digital Twins are starting to revolutionize many industries in the last decade providing a plethora of benefits to optimize the performance of industrial systems. They aim to create a continuously synchronized model of the physical system which enables rapid adaptation to dynamics, mainly unpredicted and undesirable changes. A wide range of industrial fields have already benefited from digital twins technology such as aerospace, manufacturing, healthcare, city management and maritime and shipping. Furthermore, recent research works are starting to study the integration of digital twins for computer networks to allow more innovation and intelligent management. One of the basic building blocks of digital twins technology is the Internet of Things where wireless sensors and actuators are deployed to ensure the interaction between the physical and digital worlds. This type of network is complex to manage due to its severe constraints especially when it controls critical industrial applications, resulting in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). We believe that the optimization of the IIoT will lead to efficient integration of Digital Twins in Industry 4.0. In this paper, we design a Network Digital Twin for the IIoT where sensors, actuators and communication infrastructure are replicated in the digital twin to enable intelligent real-time management of such networks. This way, new networking services such as predictive maintenance, network diagnosis, resource allocation, energy optimization with other intelligent services can be efficiently integrated and exploited in the network life-cycle. We validate the proposed architecture by providing a promising prototype implementation that should unleash the full potential of the network digital twin.