Digital Twin-Enabled Proactive Scheduling with Physical Layer Security for Self-Sustainable Industrial IoT Networks

Abstract

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks use on-demand sensing and wireless power transfer (WPT) for self-sustainable operation. Existing scheduling frameworks are fundamentally limited because they react only after energy levels decline. Consequently, IoT nodes enter charging mode only when their residual energy falls below a threshold, causing energy outages, increased latency, and missed sensing tasks while preventing proactive WPT resource allocation. This paper proposes a Digital Twin (DT)-enabled proactive scheduling framework that transforms IIoT scheduling from reactive to proactive. The key innovation is a closed-loop virtual–real integration in which a DT layer, co-located with the control centre, maintains a Kalman filter predictor to forecast node energy over an H-slot horizon, enabling scheduling decisions before energy shortages occur. Physical layer security (PLS) constraints and DT-based anomaly detection protect against eavesdropping, energy depletion, and false data injection attacks. A multi-objective formulation jointly optimises sensing utility and WPT efficiency while accounting for DT synchronisation overhead and uplink bandwidth consumption. The resulting multi-slot Binary Integer Linear Programmes (BILP) are solved using branch-and-bound with a reliability branching rule, and a fast greedy heuristic is also developed. Simulation results over 50 Monte Carlo iterations show that the proposed framework reduces energy outage events by approximately 70% compared with the reactive baseline, activates less than 50% of available sensing nodes, and schedules less than 60% of energy transmitters for WPT. Ablation studies confirm that DT prediction is the primary contributor to the outage reduction. DT-based anomaly detection achieves a false alarm rate below 3% while maintaining a detection rate above 95%. The proposed framework improves the sustainability, efficiency, and security of IIoT networks with practical computational overhead, making it well suited for Industry 5.0 deployments.