Digital Twins and Multi-Access Edge Computing for IIoT

Abstract

Background: All recent technology findings could be involved and combined to strengthen the “Industrial Internet of Things” (IIoT) sector. The novel technology of “Multi-Access Edge Computing” or “Mobile Edge Computing” (MEC) rises rapidly in the industry as well as the “Digital Twins”. MEC is the middle-layer between mobile devices and cloud, which offers scalability, reliability, security, efficient control, and storage of resources. On the other hand, digital twins form a communication model that will enhance the whole system by improving the latency, the overhead, and the energy consumption. The overall paper is focused on the biggest challenges that researchers in the field of IIoT have to overcome in order to gain a more efficient communication environment in terms of technology integration, efficient energy and data delivery, storage spaces, security, and real-time control and analysis. Therefore, a distributed system has been established in a local network, in which several functions operate. Also, a MEC-based framework has been proposed in order to reduce the traffic and the latency by merging the processing of the data generated by the IIoT devices at the edge of the network. The evaluation of critical parts of the proposed IIoT system has been performed with emulation software. The results have shown that data delivery and offloading have been done more efficiently, the energy consumption and the processing have been improved, and the security, complexity, control, and reliability have been enhanced.

Keywords

• Digital Twins
• Energy Efficiency
• IIoT
• Load Balance
• MCC
• MEC