Connecting the Twins: A Review on Digital Twin Technology & its Networking Requirements

Digital twin technology can be considered as an innovation accelerator. By providing a live copy of physical systems, digital twins bring to the table numerous advantages such as accelerated business processes, enhanced productivity, and faster innovation with reduced costs. For these numerous advantages digital twin is an ideal solution for several problems in domains such as Industry 4.0, education, healthcare and smart cities. However, to make sure the digital twin contributes effectively to these domains by representing a synchronized real-time copy of the physical system, the network connecting the physical and digital twins should fulfill a set of requirements such as low latency of real-time communication, data security and quality. This paper provides an overview on the technology of digital twin and its application domains with a detailed discussion on its networking requirements and proposed enabling technologies to fulfill them.