Page 113 - Kaleidoscope Academic Conference Proceedings 2020

WIRELESS TECHNOLOGY AND PROTOCOL FOR IIOT AND DIGITAL TWINS

Jie Tan, Xiubin Sha, Bo Dai, Ting Lu

ZTE Corporation and State Key Laboratory of Mobile Network and Mobile Multimedia Technology, China

ABSTRACT physical entity. It creates a high realism virtual model for
physical object in digital mode, and simulates, analyzes and
The industrial Internet of things (IIoT) is an important forecasts its behavior, which paves the way for the
engine for manufacturing enterprises to provide intelligent integration of information technology and manufacturing. In
products and services. The data analysis model represented addition, as an edge-side technology, digital twins can
by digital twins is the core of IIoT development in the effectively connect the perceptual layer and the transmission
manufacturing industry. With the development of IIoT, more layer. Therefore, the industrial Internet platform is the
and more attention has been paid to the application of ultra- incubator of the digital twins, and the digital twins are
reliable and low latency communications (URLLC) in the important scenarios for industrial Internet platforms.
field of IIoT. This paper mainly introduces the development
of 3GPP for URLLC in reducing delay and enhancing Specifically, all kinds of data collection and exchange of
reliability, as well as the research on little jitter and high physical entities should be realized by means of the IIoT. The
transmission efficiency, and further analyzes the enhanced advantages of the platform, such as resource aggregation,
key technologies required in the IIoT. Finally, the dynamic configuration, supply and demand docking, should
application of IIoT in digital twins is analyzed according to be used to integrate and utilize all kinds of resources. For
the actual situation. example, the industrial Internet platform is used to associate
the edge infrastructure with the digital twin in the downward
Keywords – Digital twins, industrial Internet of things direction, and transfer and store the data in the cloud in the
(IIoT), standards upward direction. Other users can also set up digital twins
through platform services according to their own needs. It
1. INTRODUCTION can be said that the industrial Internet platform has activated
the life of digital twins. As shown in Figure 1, the physical
In recent years, the fourth industrial revolution accelerated entity of the physical space and the digital twins of the virtual
by the industrial Internet of things (IIoT) has raised a global space are connected through the network. Among them, the
upsurge [1], [2]. The network technology of a cognitive IIoT miniaturization of IIoT technology makes the creation of
system helps to establish the information relationship digital twins possible and uses sensor systems to realize data
between the real world and the virtual space, which includes sharing between virtual and physical objects. Furthermore,
the perceptual layer (perceptual control technology), 5G networks can provide a faster connection speed between
transmission layer (network communication technology), virtual and real objects, and improve operation efficiency
and application layer (information processing technology) and reliability by reducing response times.
[3]. The boom in IIoT cannot be achieved without technical
support, including digital twins, edge computing, time The transmission layer in a framework of the cognitive IIoT
sensitive networks (TSN), and passive optical networks mainly includes short distance wireless communication
(PON). technology, a low-power wide-area network, and the
industrial Ethernet. As we all know, the Cellular 5G, LTE
With the promotion of IIoT applications, digital twins are CAT M1/M2, LoRaWAN, and NB-IoT are representative
endowed with new vitality. The IIoT extends the value and technologies in the IoT, while IIoT relies heavily on the
life cycle of digital twins, highlighting the advantages and availability of wireless connections [5], [6]. Considering that
capabilities of digital twins in terms of models, data, and classical field buses cannot be directly included in the IIoT
services. Digita twins applications and iterative system, their features are incompatible with Internet features,
optimization are the real path that is becoming the incubator and their performance is not sufficient to transmit Internet
of digital twins [4]. packets. In particular, these networks do not support IIoT-
based IPv6, but they can be interconnected through gateway
Based on the basic state of the physical entity, digital twins devices [7], [8]. It is quite challenging to introduce industrial
make a highly realistic analysis of the established model and networks into an IIoT system. Because applications often
collected data in a dynamic and real-time way, which is used have stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements, which
for the monitoring, prediction and optimization of the may be difficult to meet, e.g. configuration, robustness,
reliability, latency, determinism, energy efficiency, battery

978-92-61-31391-3/CFP2068P @ ITU 2020 – 55 – Kaleidoscope