Optical Wireless Communication-Based Vehicular Fleet Management Case Analogy With Digital Twin IoT Middleware

Rapid growth in the number of sensing elements demands novel communication approaches and the utilization of computational prowess for modern intelligent systems and futuristic technological diligence with the Internet of things (IoT). There are advanced trends in applications related to cyberphysical systems, where interaction with physical sensing elements and digital computational resources is predominant. This article explores an application of a digital twin (DT) in vehicle fleet management utilizing optical wireless communication technology. A digital microservice architecture for receiving sensor data, storage, and real-time visualization is implemented, incorporating the open-source Eclipse Ditto framework as a DT-based IoT middleware solution. The pilot experimental setup for the functional implementation of the proof of concept of the proposed system architecture is analysed. We have used 10 m long visible-light communication links to transmit custom string information, replicating sensor data from a vehicle equipped with light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and sending it to the receiver node on the edge server. The bit error rates of 4×10−10 and 1×10−6 were measured for a maximum link distance of up to 15 m in the case of vehicle to infrastructure links and infrastructure to vehicle, respectively. The research demonstrates an integration between the computational processing scenario and a physical communication interface for vehicular applications within a DT framework. The fleet management application is proposed and implemented as a prototype for a fleet of ten vehicles transmitting sensor information to the DT application for telematics and alert handling.