Is It Running? Unveiling 6G-Driven System-of-Systems Testbeds using Visual Metaphors

The rapidly evolving new concepts of the 6G technology raise the challenge of assessing how well 6G-enabled system-of-systems architectures perform in real-life situations beyond theories and simulations. To facilitate this, a new Visual Metaphor layer is presented in this paper to add the visualization feature for a system-of-systems Digital Twin (DT). Visual metaphor plays a crucial role in assisting network engineers to comprehend complex 6G concepts through intuitive visual representations. Powered by an immersive Augmented Reality (AR) based on laser projection system, the metaphor framework seamlessly projects the simulated environments into reality and vice versa. Thus, it bridges the gap between theoretical development and practical implementation. Furthermore, it features a plug-and-play solution to accommodate the validation of integrated systems and applications easily. To validate the performance and show the flexibility of the visual metaphor layer, we perform three case studies from the application contexts of teleoperation, platooning, and intralogistics. The results show that the visual metaphor can visualize internal network states, such as communication links, as well as virtual objects and other environmental features. The metaphor can accomplish these diverse and modular tasks while preserving an overall system response time of 55 ms in large-scale scenarios with up to 40 robots.