A Digital Twin Environment for 5G Vehicle-to-Everything: Architecture and Open Issues

The advent of 5G Vehicle-to-Everything (5G-V2X) technology has revolutionized daily life and the economy. However, the complexity of testing 5G-V2X systems in lab and field settings along with the development cost is increasingly challenging. To overcome these issues, the paper proposes the use of Digital Twin technology, which offers a precise, accurate, and controllable lab-based representation of real-world test conditions. The main idea is to design an open-ended digital twin architecture specifically tailored for 5G-V2X, with the aim of fostering innovation in various aspects of autonomous driving. Considering the recent improvement in Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) and Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) technologies in the proposed architecture, it not only facilitates the development and testing of diverse and sophisticated network and communication layers solutions and applications, but also provides a real-time environment to evaluate new artificial intelligence (AI) methods, data and model sharing, and progress measurement in the field of 5G-V2X.