A Survey on Digital Twin Networks: Use Cases and Enabling Technologies

Recently, Digital Twin Networks (DTNs) have emerged as an approach to combine several modern technologies to empower traditional industry and manufacturing. DTNs integrate multiple physical entities and their virtual replicas to form an interconnected and intelligent working system. The framework of DTNs enables data collection and analysis, therefore optimizing the management and production. This paper presents a review of this technology and aim to propose a layer-based architecture, thus underscoring the use cases and the enabling technologies. To begin with, we clarify the concept of DTNs and explain its development and advantages, then provide an detailed explanation of our proposed system model. Following this, we focus on real-world DTNs applications and the key technologies that enable DTNs, including hardware, modeling techniques, communication, and data processing. Additionally, this paper comes with a discussion on the challenges to implementing DTNs, such as data security, privacy, coherence, and interoperability issues. To address such challenges, we explore future research directions and help researchers and practitioners in the field, offering insights into the potential applications and technological advancements.