A Fault-Tolerant Communication Algorithm for Age-of-Information Optimization in DITENs

As an amalgamation of digital twin and edge computing, the digital twin edge networks (DITENs) have drawn much attention from industry and academia to bridge the divide between physical edge networks and digital systems. Meanwhile, the physical hardware and open-access wireless communication environments in edge networks raise significant challenges in timely information aggregation and real-time status updates for digital twins, especially in the presence of inherent failure and hostile jamming. In this paper, we investigate the fault-tolerant Age-of-Information (AoI) optimization problem for digital twin edge networks against the severe fault phenomena in wireless communications. In contrast to previous works that focus on single fault or individual jamming behavior, we propose a comprehensive communication failure model over the f non-overlapping wireless sub-channels, where f ₁ out of the f sub-channels are inherently failed and f ₂ out of the f sub-channels are jammed by adversaries. Then, based on the multi-channel communication failure model, we present a distributed fault-tolerant communication algorithm to minimize the expected average peak AoI in DITENs. Using an adaptive transmission strategy, we prove that the AoI optimization issue for n end devices can be resolved within Θ( n ) time steps when f ₁ + f ₂ < f . Both theoretical analyses and empirical simulations are conducted to verify the fault-tolerance and efficiency of our proposed algorithm despite the communication failures.