Digital-Twin-Enabled 6G Mobile Network Video Streaming Using Mobile Crowdsourcing

Abstract

Digital-twin-enabled cloud-centric architecture is a promising evolution trend of sixth generation (6G) network, which brings new opportunities and challenges for mobile video streaming-related services requiring the exponentially increasing traffic demands. Device-to-Device (D2D) communication paradigm is an attractive technique to alleviate the problem. However, the previous research work on D2D built on individuals' random mobility or position snapshot and cannot guarantee the stable communication flow. In this paper, we leverage the cybertwin as a centric controller and take advantages of crowdsourcing technology to attract mobile users to follow the specified path and share their network resources with other users. The design of the specified path is formulated as a problem of user recruitment optimization with cost constraint, which is a NP-Hard problem. Firstly, we investigate a special case of only one mobile user to offer the network resource and present a pseudo-polynomial time algorithm. Secondly, we present a graph-partition-based approach to solve the more complex case of multiple mobile users. Thirdly, we discuss the least expected budget to achieve the maximum utility in an ideal model. Fourthly, we perform extensive experiments to evaluate and compare the performance with the typical ones in simulated digital-twin-enabled 6G networks.