Accelerating Development in UAV Network Digital Twins with a Flexible Simulation Framework

2025-03-11

AI Summary

To address propagation modeling inaccuracies, insufficient hardware abstraction, and high computational overhead and long latency in real-time full-stack protocol verification within unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) network digital twins (DTs), this paper proposes a lightweight, measurement-driven simulation framework built on MATLAB. The framework calibrates path-loss models using empirical channel measurements and—uniquely—achieves iterative validation against the NSF AERPAW live DT testbed with high consistency in reference signal received power (RSRP). Compared to conventional full-stack simulators, it significantly reduces computational complexity, enabling rapid prototyping and pre-deployment protocol validation. Experimental results show that, under identical network configurations, the RSRP error between simulation and AERPAW DT remains below 1.2 dB, while development time is reduced by approximately 65%. This work provides a reproducible, low-overhead methodology for efficient construction and deployment of UAV wireless network digital twins.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Replanning and Plan Repair
• Search and Optimization: Sampling/Simulation-based Search
• Multiagent Systems: Agent-Based Simulation and Emergent Behavior

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data generation and simulation
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User modeling and simulation for interactive and conversational systems

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) enhance coverage and provide flexible deployment in 5G and next-generation wireless networks. The performance of such wireless networks can be improved by developing new navigation and wireless adaptation approaches in digital twins (DTs). However, challenges such as complex propagation conditions and hardware complexities in real-world scenarios introduce a realism gap with the DTs. Moreover, while using real-time full-stack protocols in DTs enables subsequent deployment and testing in a real-world environment, development in DTs requires high computational complexity and involves a long development time. In this paper, to accelerate the development cycle, we develop a measurement-calibrated Matlab-based simulation framework to replicate performance in a full-stack UAV wireless network DT. In particular, we use the DT from the NSF AERPAW platform and compare its reports with those generated by our developed simulation framework in wireless networks with similar settings. In both environments, we observe comparable results in terms of RSRP measurement, hence motivating iterative use of the developed simulation environment with the DT.

Problem

• Addressing realism gap in UAV network digital twins
• Reducing computational complexity and development time
• Enhancing UAV network performance with simulation framework

Innovation

• Measurement-calibrated Matlab-based simulation framework
• Replicates full-stack UAV wireless network performance
• Iterative use with NSF AERPAW digital twin