Digital twin-assisted multi-layer networks for low-latency and energy-efficient communication
Muhammad Adnan Qadir, Muhammad Naeem, Waleed Ejaz · Computer Communications · 2025
The sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks are expected to provide ubiquitous connectivity, high data rate, low latency, energy efficiency, and edge intelligence for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Digital twin technology is a promising solution to enable multi-layer wireless networks that incorporate IoT devices on the ground, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as mobile edge computing (MEC) servers, and cloud servers. Multi-layer processing can handle time-sensitive and computationally intensive tasks from IoT devices. This paper proposes a digital twin-assisted multi-layer network for low-latency and energy-efficient communication and computation. We mathematically formulate an optimization problem to minimize the latency and energy consumption of IoT devices by optimizing their association with the UAV-MECs, computation resources, communication resources, and offloading portions of tasks. We propose a two-stage scheme based on the K-means method and the deep neural network approach to solve the above optimization problem. We compare the proposed two-stage scheme with existing schemes to highlight the scalability of the proposed solution. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed multi-layer network achieved optimization results comparable to existing schemes with less computational cost, highlighting its usefulness in achieving low latency and energy-efficient computation and communication.