Digital Twin for the Internet of Vehicles

As a working combination of smart vehicles, advanced communication infrastructures, and intelligent transportation units, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has emerged as a new paradigm for safe and efficient urban life in the future. However, various types of smart vehicles with distinct capacities, diverse IoV applications with different resource demands, and unpredictive vehicular topology pose significant challenges to fully realize IoV systems. To cope with these challenges, we leverage digital twin (DT) technology to model complex physical IoV systems in virtual space, to identify the relation between application characteristics and IoV services, which facilitates effective service scheduling and resource management. In this chapter, we discuss the motivation, benefits, and key issues of applying DT in IoV systems. Then, we use vehicular edge computing and caching as two typical IoV application scenarios to present DT-empowered task offloading and content caching scheduling schemes and their performance.