Digital Twin-Empowered Routing Management for Reliable Multi-Hop Millimeter Wave V2X

TL;DR

The paper tackles the reliability challenges of mmWave V2X in dynamic urban topologies by proposing a mobility digital twin (DT) that enables zero-touch, DT-driven multi-hop routing. It defines a DT-based system architecture, a mmWave V2X channel model with LOS/NLOS considerations, and a reliability metric, then compares two routing approaches—real-time routing and trajectory-prediction-based planning—via a Unity AWSIM proof-of-concept using Dijkstra routing and LSTM trajectory prediction. Results show substantial reliability gains over conventional VANET routing, reaching up to $99.93\%$ in fully connected scenarios and maintaining strong performance in mixed traffic, with real-time routing offering the top performance and trajectory prediction providing latency robustness. The work demonstrates a practical, DT-enabled framework for reliable mmWave V2X in dynamic traffic, with potential for real-world deployment and further enhancements in latency reduction and prediction accuracy.

Abstract

Digital twin (DT) technology can replicate physical entities in cyberspace. A mobility DT digitalizes connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) and their surrounding traffic environment, allowing to monitor the maneuvering and distribution of CAVs in real-time, which is crucial for managing vehicle-to-everything (V2X) connectivity, especially when millimeter wave (mmWave) is adopted. MmWave V2X relies on dynamic multi-hop communications to ensure high reliability. Therefore, in this paper, the challenges of mmWave V2X are presented to motivate the utilization of DT, and then we introduce the system model for DT-based multi-hop routing management, incorporating two different routing algorithms: with and without future trajectory prediction. For proof of concept, we implement the proposed DT system using Unity-based AWSIM and evaluate the proposed algorithms via simulations. The results show that, compared to the conventional routing algorithm in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), the DT-based algorithms significantly improve the reliability of mmWave V2X, and such improvements can be seen in both fully connected and mixed traffic scenarios.

Figures (5)

• Figure 1: System architecture.
• Figure 2: DT-based multi-hop routing algorithm flowchart.
• Figure 3: System evaluation scenario.
• Figure 4: Implementation of DT-based multi-hop routing management simulation system.
• Figure 5: System evaluation results.