Wireless Digital Twin for Assessing the Reliability of Vehicular Communication Links

Digital twins are becoming a key technology in evaluating hardware and system performance in wireless communications. The explosion of new use cases in time-sensitive, safety critical scenarios and the stringent requirements for new communication standards are creating a demand for repeatable and cost-effective verification methodologies. In this paper we propose a methodology for building site-specific digital twins of wireless vehicular communication links, enabling us to obtain time-variant packet error rates and asses the link reliability in safety-critical vehicular communications scenarios. The digital twin utilizes a real-time geometry-based stochastic channel model to simulate doubly selective channel frequency responses. The frequency responses are used as input to a hardware-in-the-loop setup, to obtain time-variant packet error rates between two commercial modems. We demonstrate the functionality of the proposed approach by developing a digital twin of a multi-link vehicular scenario. Based on time-critical application requirements we use the obtained error rates to estimate the 90 % tail probability of the link level latency. In our assessment of the obtained metrics, we see how a geo-routing scenario, combining a shadowed with a relay link, can be used to increase the link reliability and reduce link latency.