Can Vehicles Foresee Communication Disruptions?: Feasibility of V2X Network Digital Twin

Reliable network connectivity is an essential building block of connected and intelligent vehicles. However, the performance of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications usually fluctuates as vehicles travel in a city, due to the imperfect coverage of wireless base stations, excessive network load, etc. To ensure the reliability of network services, vehicles shall be able to foresee potential communication disruptions, and take preventive actions to mitigate the impact on the application-level quality of service (QoS). In this paper, we introduce the concept of V2X Network Digital Twin (V2X-DT). It maintains digital representations of vehicles, roadways, and V2X communication networks, to predict the upcoming communication performance by means of simulations and/or inference by machine learning models. We develop a proof-of-concept implementation on top of a co-simulation framework, and showcase the initial feasibility of the proactive V2X network operation, enabled by V2X-DT.