Multilayer placement of heterogeneous UAVs and tethered balloons for digital twin-assisted smart city systems

Masroor, R. and Naeem, M. and Ejaz, W. and Abrar, M. and Nauman, A. (2026) Multilayer placement of heterogeneous UAVs and tethered balloons for digital twin-assisted smart city systems. Internet of Things (The Netherlands): 101908.

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Abstract

Metaverse is an evolving technology that incorporates all the technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, big data, and many others. Metaverse has covered all the applications, i.e., engineering, day-to-day work, and social media. In this era of the fastest technology, changing mobility, and day-by-day upgradation in technology, all need communication backup assistance for the meta user. The conventional telecommunication setup offers high coverage but is limited by the flexibility of the infrastructure. In this article, we have proposed a multilayer system in a smart city with multiple sizes of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The hierarchical system is divided into three layers: the digital twin (DT) User Layer, the DT User-UAV Connection Layer, and the UAV-Balloon Connection Layer. The mathematical model works in the link between these layers when a DT user needs a connection. According to the capacity of the DT user, the UAV will be connected to a DT user, which in turn gets connected from the tethered balloon (T-balloon) following the set of system constraints. To validate the proposed model, we have proposed an optimal algorithm that is compared with heuristic and greedy algorithms to prove the authenticity of the results.