When Digital Twin Meets Network Softwarization in the Industrial IoT: Real-Time Requirements Case Study

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is known to be a complex system because of its severe constraints as it controls critical applications. It is difficult to manage such networks and keep control of all the variables impacting their operation during their whole lifecycle. Meanwhile, Digital Twinning technology has been increasingly used to optimize the performances of industrial systems and has been ranked as one of the top ten most promising technological trends in the next decade. Many Digital Twins of industrial systems exist nowadays but only few are destined to networks. In this paper, we propose a holistic digital twinning architecture for the IIoT where the network is integrated along with the other industrial components of the system. To do so, the concept of Network Digital Twin is introduced. The main motivation is to permit a closed-loop network management across the whole network lifecycle, from the design to the service phase. Our architecture leverages the Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm as an expression of network softwarization. Mainly, the SDN controller allows for setting up the connection between each Digital Twin of the industrial system and its physical counterpart. We validate the feasibility of the proposed architecture in the process of choosing the most suitable communication mechanism that satisfies the real-time requirements of a Flexible Production System.

Interference-aware metrics impact on the performance of incremental multipath routing in WSNs

Multipath routing has been considered in the literature to provide bandwidth aggregation for high data rate applications. Because of the phenomena of inter-path interference in wireless networks, the overall throughput is far from being the summation of the provided ones by the different paths individually. One promising solution to this problem is to make use of interference aware metrics to build multiple paths such that the inter-path interference is minimised. In this work, we are interested in assessing the impact of a set of interference aware metrics on the performance of incremental multipath routing in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Incremental multipath routing builds one path per request/reply session and hence is more suitable to be combined to interference aware metrics. We review, implement and evaluate both active and passive monitoring metrics and show that for constrained networks such as WSNs, the latter are more adapted. Additionally, we show that within the passive monitoring metrics, the best one is not necessarily the most expensive to measure.