List of Publications by Department for the Academic Year From Age of Information to Age of Digital Twin: A Review on Synchronization Metrics for IoT Networks
Abstract
Recently, the advent of digital twins (DTs) has sparked significant interest in both business
and academics offering new perspectives into our increasingly digitalized society. The aim of DT is to
create a digital representation of a physical entity, be it a process, an object, or a system, by using the
entity’s characteristics and behavior. This enables real-time prediction, optimization, monitoring, control,
and better decision-making. The adoption of digital twins is growing in various industry verticals due to
the rapid proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT), computing power, artificial intelligence, and big data.
Furthermore, the incorporation of metaverse and augmented reality technologies with digital twins bridges
the gapbetweenthephysicalandvirtualworldsinmanufacturingbyprovidingintuitivewaystovisualizeand
interact with DT data. Identifying the main performance metrics of a DT is crucial to develop a high-fidelity
replica of the physical entity to ensure better informed decisions. Research and industry have focused on
accuracy and synchronization as key performance metrics with varying definitions. To this end, the aim of
this study is to survey the synchronization metrics used in the existing related literature and to establish
a more representative synchronization measure for digital twins. Among all metrics, the freshness of the
information delivered to the DT, coined as Age of Information (AoI), remains the most adopted measure.
In this paper, we review the evaluation of AoI in different network scenarios and introduce Age of Digital
Twin (AoDT) to reliably measure the synchronization gap between digital and physical twins. We proceed
to formulating AoDT expressions in common network scenarios to be used for planning and developing
high-fidelity digital twins
Journal/Conference Information
IEEE Access,DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2025.3591589
, ISSN: 2169-3536, Volume: 13, Issue: 1, Pages Range: 1102-1119,