On the Physical Layer of Digital Twin: An Integrated Sensing and Communications Perspective

The digital twin (DT), which effectively represents the actual real-world physical system or process, has reshaped the classic manufacturing, construction, as well as healthcare industry. As for realizing DT, both sensing and communication functionalities are demanded, which fully builds the connectivity between the physical world and the digital world. We first conducted a survey on the current situation of DT combined with communication and sensing. Inspired from this survey and the current development of communication and sensing, in this paper, we attempt to study the communication annd sensing technologies of physical layer in DT, to reduce the hardware and spectrum overhead. First, we studied the degree of freedom (DoF) problem in general communication and sensing system, and contribute to the DoF definition in the sensing system. Then, in order to improve the spectrum efficiency in DT system, we proposed an iterative optimization framework to address the coexistence of communication and sensing, and some examples are provided. Finally, in order to pursue a better integration gain, we proposed a new waveform design method based on DoF completion. The proposed optimization method can achieve the mean square error (MSE) lower bound. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of various problems in the above scenarios.