FETCH: Fast and Efficient Data Collection for Harmonizing Real and Virtual World

The integration ofDigital Twin(DT) into Metaverse plays a significant role in providing virtual replicas of the real world.Internet of Things(IoT) enables thePhysical Entities(PE) of the real-world to get appropriately mapped with their respective DTs. In recent works,Multi-Access Edge Computing(MEC)-based architecture shows faster mapping solution through UAV-based real-time data-collection from the PEs. Energy constraint in both the PEs and the UAVs is an important aspect in the whole process. Recent advancements in energy harvesting technologies directly benefit the PEs, the energy constraint in UAVs is still a stringent factor. Unfortunately existing works fail to address both the speed of data-collection as well as energy consumption of the UAVs together. In this work, we propose aConcurrent-Transmission(CT)-assisted mechanism, FETCH which addresses both of these factors together. In contrast to existing approaches, FETCH exploits CT to realize efficient coordination among the PEs so that a significant part of the data-collection can be done in parallel through the PE network. This helps the UAVs to significantly reduce their movements enhancing the utilization of their battery capacity. Evaluation shows that FETCH enables up to 88% faster and 89% energy efficient data-collection compared to the existing best known approaches. Moreover, it provides seamless support for change in topology of PEs. We also show that FETCH accomplishes a significantly higher rate of PE-DT mapping realizing superior quality of service.