Digital twin platform for real-time data communication in UAV environment

Abstract

Real-time data communication is essential for controlling objects from virtual space to physical space through digital twins. However, existing digital twin platforms for UAV environments primarily focus on data modeling, prediction, and simulation rather than real-time performance and have not been extensively evaluated for real-time data communication, which may limit their applicability in real-world UAV operations. This paper introduces the RC-DT(Real-Time Communication Digital Twin)-Platform, which supports real-time data communication in UAV environments. The RC-DT-Platform’s data communication performance was evaluated by measuring the throughput as bandwidth, and the number of registered items increased. Results show that the RC-DT-Platform can transmit approximately 454 data/sec for 100 bytes data, 119 data/sec for 100 KB data, and 0.7 data/sec for 16 MB of data. Additionally, with 32 registered objects, the RC-DT-Platform can achieve a read throughput of about 3500 data/sec, regardless of data size. The performance of pure Ditto degrades by up to approximately 10 times as the number of registered objects increases up to 32, whereas the RC-DT-Platform maintains a degradation of less than 6.25 times. Thus, the RC-DT-Platform meets the required real-time data communication performance by considering flight speed, data size, and data generation rate.