A Digital Twin enabled Maritime Networking Architecture

With the continuous increase of maritime activities and services, it is imperative to establish the “Smart Ocean” architecture, to promote more efficient and safe marine information dissemination with high quality of service provisioning. In this paper, we propose a digital twin (DT) assisted maritime networking architecture based on a comprehensive review of the maritime networks, where the roles and superiority of DT are emphasized with the consideration of the network heterogeneity and dynamics. We utilize the interaction between virtual and physical entities to improve the flexibility and adaptability of the network, aiming at more efficient maritime network resource management and optimization. We then discuss the main challenges and some potential research issues in DT-assisted marine network design. The proposed maritime networking architecture based on DT can provide a good reference for network planning and deployment of maritime networking architecture to adapt to different marine environments.