TwiNet: Connecting Real World Networks to their Digital Twins Through a Live Bidirectional Link

The wireless spectrum’s increasing complexity poses challenges and opportunities, highlighting the necessity for real-time solutions and robust data processing capabilities. Digital Twin (DT), virtual replicas of physical systems, integrate real-time data to mirror their real-world counterparts, enabling precise monitoring and optimization. Incorporating DTs into wireless communication enhances predictive maintenance, resource allocation, and troubleshooting, thus bolstering network reliability. Our paper introduces TwiNet, enabling bidirectional, near-real-time links between real-world wireless spectrum scenarios and DT replicas. Utilizing the protocol, MQTT, we can achieve data transfer times with an average latency of 14 ms, suitable for real-time communication. This is confirmed by monitoring real-world traffic and mirroring it in real-time within the DT’s wireless environment. We evaluate TwiNet’s performance in two distinct use cases: (i) enhancing Safe Adaptive Data Rate (SADR) systems by assessing risky traffic configurations of UEs, resulting in approximately 15% improved network performance compared to original network selections; and (ii) deploying new CNNs in response to jammed pilots, where the DL pipeline achieves up to 97% accuracy by training on artificial data and deploying a new model in as low as 2 minutes to counter persistent adversaries. TwiNet enables swift deployment and adaptation of DTs, addressing crucial challenges in modern wireless communication systems.