Physical-to-virtual testbed
A Raspberry Pi vehicle transmitted battery and operating data to a synchronized Unity and Blender digital-twin environment.
Connected battery systems
EV Twin Protocol Benchmark
Which communication protocol gives an electric-vehicle digital twin the right balance of speed, reliability, and resource use?
Journal of Communications and Networks paper
Why I built it
How do MQTT, TCP, UDP, AMQP, ZeroMQ, HTTPS, WebSockets, CoAP, and OPC-UA perform under the practical constraints of EV digital-twin communication?
A digital twin depends on a continuous exchange between the physical asset and its virtual representation. In an electric vehicle, that exchange must remain responsive without exhausting the memory, processor, or network capacity of embedded hardware.
This project built a physical Raspberry Pi vehicle and a Unity-based digital twin, then evaluated nine communication protocols using the same battery-data exchange workflow. The study makes protocol selection an evidence-based engineering decision rather than a default software choice.
The experimental communication testbed links the physical electric vehicle, protocol clients, server terminal, and three-dimensional digital twin used for controlled protocol evaluation.
How the system works
Nine-protocol benchmark
Each protocol was tested through a common client-server workflow so latency, throughput, bandwidth, packet loss, CPU use, and memory use could be compared directly.
Deployment-oriented interpretation
The analysis connects measured performance to real deployment contexts, including resource-constrained devices, real-time exchange, and industrial interoperability.
9communication protocols evaluated
6performance dimensions measured
MQTTstrong resource-constrained option
UDPlowest-latency option
What this work contributes
From a research question to an inspectable system.
- A physical EV and virtual-twin testbed for repeatable protocol evaluation.
- Direct comparison of lightweight messaging, transport, web, industrial, and middleware protocols.
- Evidence that MQTT balances low bandwidth and CPU demand for constrained environments.
- Evidence that UDP minimizes latency when reliability can be handled elsewhere.
- A protocol-selection guide that also identifies CoAP for efficient resource use and OPC-UA for industrial settings.
How I read the results
What the evidence means
No protocol dominates every requirement. MQTT is compelling when bandwidth and embedded resources are limited, UDP prioritizes latency, CoAP operates efficiently on constrained devices, and OPC-UA offers industrial structure at a higher resource cost. The right protocol follows from the twin's operating context.
Current scope
What this study validates
The study evaluates three clients sequentially on a Raspberry Pi-based testbed. It establishes a practical baseline for future security, hardware-diversity, and concurrent fleet-scale experiments.
Inside the system
More evidence from the research.
