Intelligent Digital Twin-Based Software-Defined Vehicular Networks

SDVN is a promising architecture to extend the computation resources which break through the limitations of current vehicular networks. It is possible to learn new networking schemes by observing the surrounding environment in SDVN. However, within SDVN, the construction and application of such schemes still lack proper consideration in data collection, prediction, verification, and validation before applying these schemes in the real network, which is due to the limited knowledge of the physical environment. Intelligent Digital Twin (IDT) was initially designed for realizing intelligent manufacturing by virtualizing and learning the data of the physical space in cyberspace. Hence, bringing IDT to networking can provide additional valuable functionalities to meet the above considerations by constructing a virtual intelligent network space, aiming to realize the iterative update of the networking schemes in an adaptive way. In this article, we introduce a new network architecture, IDT-SDVN, by maximizing the advantages of SDVNs. We present the challenges and open issues of IDT-SDVNs. A case study is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of SDVNs. The experimental results show that significant improvement of performance is achieved for vehicular networking with the proposed IDT-SDVNs.