Breaking Down Data Sharing Barrier of Smart City: A Digital Twin Approach

Smart city aims to enhance the efficacy of urban management and improve quality of citizen life. This however faces a fundamental difficulty due to the inadequate data sharing among social entities, which has become one of the key barriers to the in-depth development of smart city, making wasted information resources and application silos ubiquitous. As an emerging communication paradigm, the digital twin network (DTN) has potential to eliminate the data sharing barrier in smart city. By mapping the social physical entities (PEs) in smart city to digital virtual agents, namely data twins (DTs), valuable data can be directly shared among the DTs over DTN without physical constraints, and form decisions that feed back and guide the operation of PEs. In this article, we explore the role of DTN in supporting the smart city and promoting data sharing construction. We first introduce the basic concepts related to DTN and propose the architecture of DTN-enabled smart city. The key features of DTN-enabled smart city are then discussed with an emphasis on the security and privacy issues with fundamental solutions around data sharing in DTN-enabled smart city. As a case study, we investigate the data sharing in DTN-enabled smart city and design the secure and fair data sharing mechanism. Finally, we propose open challenges for achieving more reliable DTN-enabled smart city.