Communication-A ware Digital-Twin Reliability Budgeting

for Fog-Assisted Wireless Sensor Ad Hoc Networks

Safina Shokeen1,* Vishal Srivastava2

1 School of Engineering and Technology, VIPS-TC, India

2 Department of Industrial Internet of Things, School of Engineering and Technology, Vivekananda Institute of Professional Studies,

Technical Campus, Delhi 110034, India

Received: February 09, 2026 Revised: March 19, 2026 Accepted: April 18, 2026 ⋆ Corresponding author

ABSTRACT

Wireless sensor IoT systems are increasingly deployed as infrastructure-light communication fabrics in which

battery-powered devices exchange event streams through local gateways, fog nodes, and sometimes multi-hop ad hoc

routes. In such settings, reliability cannot be judged only by how fast a packet reaches a server. A reading may be

fresh but untrusted, energy-efficient but delayed, or successfully delivered through a route that overloads the next fog

node. This article revises the problem as a communication-aware reliability budgeting task for fog-assisted wireless

sensor ad hoc networks. It reviews core studies on wireless sensor networking, fog and edge computing, digital

twins, edge intelligence, federated learning, and IoT security, then introduces an extended Digital-Twin Reliability

Budgeting model. The model maintains compact fog-side twin states and uses them to govern route choice, event

compression, fog offloading, replication, and cloud escalation. Three mathematical algorithms are presented for

twin synchronization, route-and-action selection, and adaptive budget learning. The analysis develops delay, energy,

freshness, loss, trust, and occupancy terms and shows how they interact across multi-hop communication paths. The

resulting framework supports a more disciplined design philosophy: fog nodes should not only process sensor data

near the edge; they should regulate the reliability budget of each communication decision before network resources

are consumed.

Ke yw ords: Wireless sensor IoT Ad hoc communication Fog computing Digital twin Reliability budgeting

1. INTRODUCTION

Wireless sensor IoT networks have moved from simple environmental

monitoring toward applications that observe infrastructure,

healthcare spaces, energy systems, vehicles, and

industrial assets. The original promise of wireless sensor

networks was low-cost distributed observation, but contemporary

deployments are asked to deliver a much richer service:

timely information, stable operation, secure forwarding,

and continuous adaptation under battery, bandwidth, and

link-quality constraints. Earlier surveys of wireless sensor

networks identified energy and connectivity as central limitations,

while IoT architectures added cloud connectivity and

service composition to that problem space [1, 2, 3].

Fog computing emerged to narrow the distance between sensors

and cloud services. Rather than forwarding every raw

packet to distant data centers, fog nodes can preprocess data,

maintain local context, and support delay-sensitive decision

making. Foundational work on edge and fog computing

describes this continuum as a practical response to latency,

mobility, and locality requirements [4, 5]. Broader fog-IoT

surveys further show that fog nodes can provide computation,

storage, and networking support for services that cannot wait