Digital-Twin-Empowered Resource Allocation for On-Demand Collaborative Sensing

This article introduces an on-demand collaborative sensing scheme for industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) sensors in time-varying sensing environments, aiming to optimize the sensing performance by effectively allocating communication resources for sensory data sharing. Particularly, we propose a novel digital twins (DTs)-empowered resource allocation solution to facilitate scalable and flexible collaborative sensing. First, DTs create mathematical models using real-time network data to characterize the dynamic resource demands in collaborative sensing. Second, the performance of mathematical models in DTs is evaluated through data-driven methods. Building on our DT design, we propose a joint collaborative sensing and DT management scheme to optimize the resource allocation for sensory data sharing and DT operation. Furthermore, we develop a DT evaluation method featuring a variational autoencoder to evaluate the accuracy of DTs and enable closed-loop DT-based resource allocation. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed collaborative sensing scheme in optimizing the sensing performance for all sensors.