AMoND: Area-Controlled Mobile Ad-Hoc Networking With Digital Twin

Future smart cities are expected to provide intelligent services such as predictions, detections, and automation through digital twins. However, the creation of digital twins requires the processing of an enormous amount of data, thereby leading to an increase in mobile network traffic. This traffic is produced by applications in user devices and city services, which engage in local consumption at the city scale through sensor and camera devices using mobile networks. Such increased traffic can compromise the communication speed and stability. To alleviate this burden, traffic offloading becomes a crucial consideration in the beyond-5G era. This paper presents a scheme known as Area-Controlled Mobile Ad-Hoc Networking (AMoND). AMoND uses a hierarchical structure of a location layer and an ad-hoc layer to construct area-controlled mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) for mutual support of the digital twin and MANETs. AMoND effectively suppresses mobile network traffic by harnessing the digital twin to assist the MANETs during data collection for the digital twin construction. Importantly, the digital twin used in AMoND focuses on the management of node location information and does not need to reproduce the real space on a computer fully. AMoND is not dependent on a specific MANET protocol and can be used as an add-on. AMoND exhibits the ability to reduce traffic volumes by up to approximately 65%, while maintaining arrival rates that are comparable to existing MANET protocols under certain conditions.