Analyzing the Integration of 3D Building Digital Twins in Optimal IoT Networks Deployment

A recent surge in interests regarding Digital Twins in the networking community has emphasized its potential across various applications, as of the useful big data it contains. One of these studied applications involving 3D Digital Twins of buildings is the optimization of indoor IoT networks deployments. Indeed, maximizing the coverage of the deployed devices while minimizing their number and fitting technical constraints is a tedious problem, particularly in complex environments. In this paper, we propose a detailed analysis of the impact of using the Digital Twin by comparing the effects of incorporating it to optimize IoT Networks deployments against scenarios where it is not utilized. We first present the impact of the 3D Digital Twin on the environment and channel modeling, before providing a performance evaluation of Quality of Service (QoS) using a deployment optimization method based on a genetic algorithm, conducted using numerical and simulation tools on two different environments, contrasting scenarios with and without the use of the Digital Twin onto two different buildings. The obtained results show that leveraging the Digital Twin yields enhanced QoS in terms of average quality of link and coverage rate, while providing new solutions not discerned in the alternative environment within the context of a challenging technical constraint.