Service Discovery and Provisioning in Social Digital Twin Networks: A Name-based Approach

Digital Twin (DT) technology is expected to cover a crucial role in a variety of 6G application scenarios, including smart automotive, smart home and smart city. By leveraging advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) modules alongside cutting-edge communication and networking architectures, DTs will be able to develop cognitive and social skills and build relationships with each other, thus facilitating the sharing of services and experience. However, in current implementations, DTs typically engage with their physical counterpart only, for predictive main-tenance and optimization, while protocols for inter-twin commu-nications and service discovery are still unexplored. In this paper, we focus on service discovery and provisioning in DT networks hosted at the network edge. In our design, the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) notion is applied to build social networks among DTs and, in parallel, name-based primitives, according to the Information Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm, are consid-ered to support inter-twin interactions. Two distributed name-based service discovery mechanisms are envisioned: a social-driven scheme, leveraging friendship and similarities among DTs' names, and a network-driven scheme, leveraging the ICN forwarding fabric only. A performance evaluation shows the benefits of the conceived solution in terms of reduced discovery latency compared to legacy centralized approaches.