Freshness-Aware Device-to-Device Communication in Digital Twin Network for Disaster Management

In a dynamic social Internet of Things (SIoT) environment, maintaining information freshness is vital for effective disaster management. This article models a digital twin-assisted SIoT network leveraging device-to-device (D2D) communication to address the critical challenge of minimizing the age of information (AoI). A digital twin-enabled AoI-driven framework is proposed to quantify freshness and ensure real-time freshness updates of devices in disaster scenarios. The problem is formulated to optimize AoI under imperfect channel state information (CSI), by incorporating signal strength, latency, and resource allocation constraints. The proposed digital twin spatio-temporal approach (PDTSA) utilizes a spatio-temporal and hyperplane transformation concept for efficient resource management. By enabling D2D nodes to autonomously adapt transmission power and channel gain realization, the framework effectively minimizes AoI even in scenarios with limited CSI. Simulation results validate the performance of the proposed PDTSA achieving a 55.59% reduction in AoI and around a 12.1% increase in throughput compared to benchmark schemes. These results demonstrate the potential of the approach to enhance network efficiency and reliability, making it a promising solution for disaster management systems powered by SIoT. The proposed method may lead to an efficient solution for disaster management systems driven by the SIoT.