Progressive Digital Twinning of 6G and beyond: Vision, Challenges, and Research Directions

This article presents a vision of the progression of digital twinning in the context of future mobile networks to enable an era of ultimate intelligent networks. Digital twinning is the process where a physical twin gets attached to a digital replica of itself via a bi-directional link, allowing for a two-way influence between the physical and the digital worlds. We envision the process to come in stages where each stage unlocks a new level of twinning and empowers an array of features and services never touched upon before. The vision is thought to be enabled by the advances in the various technology sectors, including multi-model sensing, sensor fusion, evolved compute capabilities, data centers, machine learning, 6G and beyond, among others. The article details the twinning progression vision, presents the levels of twinning while highlighting areas of evolution, explains different approaches for constructing a digital twin, and touches upon the integration of the different twinning stages into the operation of today’s and future mobile networks. The article lists future research directions with emphasis on the fundamental areas that could support the advancement of the presented vision.