Sustainable Placement with Cost Minimization in Wireless Digital Twin Networks

Digital twin (DT) technology has a high potential to satisfy different requirements of the ever-expanding new applications. Nonetheless, the DT placement in wireless digital twin networks (WDTNs) poses a significant challenge due to the conflict between unpredictable workloads and the limited capacity of edge servers. In other words, each edge server has a risk of overload when handling an excessive number of tasks or services. Overload risks can have detrimental effects on a network's sustainability, yet this aspect is often overlooked in the literature. In this paper, we aim to study the sustainability-aware DT placement problem for WDTNs from a cost minimization perspective. To this end, we formulate the DT placement-driven cost optimization problem as a chance-constrained integer programming problem. For tractability, we transform the original non-deterministic problem into a deterministic integer linear programming (ILP) problem using the sample average approximation (SAA) approach. We prove that the transformed problem remains NP-hard and thus finding a global optimal solution is very difficult. To strike a balance between time efficiency and performance guarantee, we propose an improved local search algorithm for this ILP by identifying high-quality starting states from historical search data and enhancing the search process. Numerical results show a lower cost and higher efficiency of our proposed method compared with the previous schemes.