Towards Communication-efficient Digital Twin via AI-powered Transmission and Reconstruction

Digital twin technology has recently gathered pace in engineering communities as it allows for the convergence of the real structure and its digital counterpart. 3D point cloud data is a more effective way to describe the real world and to reconstruct the digital counterpart than the conventional 2D images or 360-degree images. Large-scale, e.g., city-scale digital twins, typically collect point cloud data via internet-of-things (IoT) devices and transmit it over wireless networks. However, the existing wireless transmission technology can not carry real-time point cloud transmission for digital twin reconstruction due to mass data volume, high processing overheads, and low delay-tolerance. We propose a novel artificial intelligence (AI) powered end-to-end framework, termed AIRec, for efficient digital twin communication from point cloud compression, wireless channel coding, and digital twin reconstruction. AIRec adopts the encoder-decoder architecture. In the encoder, a novel importance-aware pooling scheme is designed to adaptively select important points with learnable thresholds to reduce the transmission volume. We also design a novel noise-aware joint source and channel coding is proposed to adaptively adjust the transmission strategy based on SNR and map the features to error-resilient channel symbols for wireless transmission to achieve a good tradeoff between the transmission rate and reconstruction quality. The decoder can accurately reconstruct the digital twins from the received symbols. Extensive experiments of typical datasets and comparison with baselines show that we achieve a good reconstruction quality under $24\times $ compression ratio.