Enabling Social Digital Twins in the 6G Era with Information Centric Networking

By creating the virtual representation of the elements and services of physical systems, Digital Twins (DTs) are expected to provide crucial support to the ambitious Sixth-generation (6G) applications. Being data-driven entities that process a variety of data in real-time, DTs can be hosted at the network edge, thus providing low latency services. However, the deployment of a networking architecture supporting the dynamic discovery of DTs and their instantiation at the edge is still an open challenge. To fill the gap, in this article we conceive a solution that leverages two revolutionary paradigms, namely the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) and Information Centric Networking (ICN). On the one hand, SIoT can provide trustworthy interactions between DTs to support effective service discovery and composition. On the other hand, ICN is a network model that includes data-centric primitives and in-network caching to facilitate service provisioning. By combining the two paradigms, we create a new framework where DT services are requested by name and discovered in a timely fashion by navigating a name-based SIoT network. Whenever possible, services already instantiated at the edge are reused to satisfy different clients. After demonstrating the benefits of the envisioned framework with a preliminary evaluation, we highlight research opportunities for this timely topic.