Initial Path Injection-based Opportunistic Routing for Digital Twin-enabled Smart Cities

Future smart cities are expected to provide intelligent services through their digital twins. However, an enormous network traffic will be locally produced by devices of users and sensing devices for local consumption at the city scale. While wireless device-to-device communication and multi-hop networks are expected to offload the traffic from network infrastructures in beyond 5G era, routing protocols must deal with frequent topological changes owing to the mobility of nodes and unpredictable radio interference. A digital twin may allow to handle such environments by simulating and providing routing information based on city-scale spatial information. However, this may incur high computational costs owing to frequent updates of routing information. In this paper, we propose an opportunistic routing using an initial path injection based on digital twin and self-adaptation of forwarding paths without relying on network infrastructures. Finally, we revealed its self-adaptability and resilience of forwarding paths. Moreover, the proposed method reduced the traffic and transmission delay compared to the existing protocols.