How to synchronize Digital Twins? A Communication Performance Analysis
Lal Verda Cakir, Sarah Al-Shareeda, Sema F. Oktug, Mehmet Özdem, Matthew Broadbent, Berk Canberk
TL;DR
This work tackles the synchronization challenge in Digital Twins by introducing the Twin Alignment Ratio $\tau = \frac{f_a}{f_p}$ to quantify how closely actual updates meet planned twinning frequencies. Using ns-3 simulations across small to large network topologies and UDP vs TCP traffic, the authors analyze delays, jitter, packet loss, and synchronization quality under varying twinning rates and background traffic. Key findings show TCP provides more stable QoS and fewer disruptions, while UDP offers better best-effort synchronization under high network load; increasing the planned twinning frequency can degrade synchronization performance. The results highlight how network infrastructure, protocol choice, and twinning rate interact, offering guidance for adaptive synchronization and QoS-aware strategies in DT deployments.
Abstract
Synchronization is fundamental for mirroring real-world entities in real-time and supporting effective operations of Digital Twins (DTs). Such synchronization is enabled by the communication between the physical and virtual realms, and it is mostly assumed to occur in real-time. However, this is not the case, as real-life scenarios witness performance degradation that may lead to synchronization problems. Hence, as such a problem has yet to be thoroughly analyzed in the literature, this work attempts to uncover potential challenges by emulating and analyzing the DT traffic flows in networks of different scales, for different communication protocols, and with various flow configurations. We propose a Twin Alignment Ratio metric to evaluate the synchronization performance to achieve this goal. Consequently, the findings reveal the interplay of network infrastructure, protocol selection, and twinning rate on synchronization and performance.