A Secure Cross-Domain Control Mechanism for Stateful Digital Twin Migration in Edge Computing

Mobility-aware digital twin (DT) migration is increasingly used in edge computing to sustain low-latency service as physical entities and service demand move across domains. However, stateful DT migration across administrative domains requires more than placement adaptation; it also requires target-side legitimacy verification, protected-state transfer, continuity-preserving traffic transition, and invalidation of stale source-side instances. This paper presents a secure cross-domain authentication and service continuity mechanism for mobility-aware DT migration in edge computing. The proposed design formulates migration as a six-phase ordered control procedure comprising migration triggering, target-side authorization, protected-state transfer, continuity-aware traffic transition, post-migration activation, and revocation-aware completion. Security analysis examines authorization soundness, migration-state confidentiality and integrity, transition safety, and post-migration uniqueness. Performance evaluation shows that the full mechanism introduces only a bounded increase in migration-related cost while reducing service interruption at 500 MB from approximately 1.79 s without continuity-aware transition control to 285 ms in the full mechanism. The results indicate that the proposed mechanism preserves the operational benefit of mobility-aware DT migration while strengthening migration authorization, state transfer protection, and service continuity under cross-domain relocation.