WIP: Preliminary Evaluation of Digital Twins on MEC Software Architecture

Abstract

Digital Twins (DTs) are becoming a reference design abstraction for many Internet of Things (IoT) application scenarios. Also, data processing is shifting to a decentralised setting leveraging the edge computing paradigm to move computation closer to the physical devices. In this context, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) technologies on 5G cellular networks are redefining the IoT networking infrastructure by enabling ultra low latency, and reliable and responsive connectivity. However, evaluation of the MEC architecture from the application developer standpoint is currently missing from literature, as well as an assessment of performance while adopting DT on top of MEC. Therefore, this paper reports on a MEC implementation based on OpenNESS toolkit, in the context of DT-based mobility, and an evaluation of its service-level performance.