Data distribution performance for Digital Twin Synchronization: an experimental evaluation
Resumo
Digital Twin Synchronization (DTS) demands robust data distribution to handle heterogeneous flows, yet existing evaluations often overlook large messages and degraded networks. This work experimentally evaluates five middleware protocols, MQTT, AMQP, Kafka, DDS, and Zenoh, within a data-centric DTS architecture. We assess performance metrics such as latency and stability under varying message sizes (up to 2 MiB) and controlled network degradation. Our results highlight trade-offs between broker-based and brokerless architectures, identifying the most suitable solutions for the rigorous synchronization demands of Industry 4.0.Referências
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Akbarian, F., Fitzgerald, E., and Kihl, M. (2020). Synchronization in Digital Twins for Industrial Control Systems. ArXiv, abs/2006.03447.
Alghamdi, W. (2024). Synchronization Patterns for Digital Twin Systems. Journal of Applied Data Sciences.
Bezerra, W. R., Koch, F., and Westphall, C. B. (2024). Performance of security options for message protocols: A comparative analysis. International Journal of Network Management, 34.
Caiza, G. and Sanz, R. (2023). Digital Twin to Control and Monitor an Industrial Cyber-Physical Environment Supported by Augmented Reality. Applied Sciences.
Chovet, L., Garcia, G. M., Bera, A., Richard, A., Yoshida, K., and Olivares-Méndez, M. (2024). Performance Comparison of ROS2 Middlewares for Multi-robot Mesh Networks in Planetary Exploration. Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems, 111.
Corte, L. L., Rashid, S. A., and Dan, A.-M. (2025). Performance Evaluation of Brokerless Messaging Libraries. ArXiv, abs/2508.07934.
Dihan, M. S., Akash, A. I., Tasneem, Z., Das, P., Das, S. K., Islam, M. R., Islam, M. M., Badal, F., Ali, M. F., Ahmed, M. H., Abhi, S. H., Sarker, S., and Hasan, M. (2024). Digital twin: Data exploration, architecture, implementation and future. Heliyon, 10.
Dizdarevic, J., Michalke, M., and Jukan, A. (2023). Engineering and Experimentally Benchmarking Open Source MQTT Broker Implementations. ArXiv, abs/2305.13893.
do Carmo, P. R., de Freitas Bezerra, D., Filho, A. T. O., Freitas, E., Silva, M. L., Dantas, M., Oliveira, B., Kelner, J., Sadok, D. F., and Souza, R. (2024). Living on the edge: A survey of Digital Twin-Assisted Task Offloading in safety-critical environments. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 232:104024.
Ferko, E., Bucaioni, A., and Behnam, M. (2022). Architecting Digital Twins. IEEE Access, PP:1–1.
Filho, A. O. O., Barbosa, G. B. N., Rodrigues, I., Cani, C., Kelner, J., Sadok, D., and Souza, R. S. (2022). Experimental network performance evaluation for human-robot interaction collision detection using cameras. Research, Society and Development.
Freitas, E., de Oliveira Filho, A. T., do Carmo, P. R. X., Sadok, D., and Kelner, J. (2026). Digital Twin Synchronization: towards a data-centric architecture. arXiv, abs/2601.23051.
Fuller, A., Fan, Z., Day, C., and Barlow, C. (2020). Digital Twin: Enabling Technologies, Challenges and Open Research. IEEE Access, 8:108952–108971.
Gamess, E., Ford, T. N., and Trifas, M. (2021). Performance Evaluation of a Widely Used Implementation of the MQTT Protocol with Large Payloads in Normal Operation and under a DoS Attack. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Southeast Conference, ACM SE ’21, page 154–162, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery.
Gavrilov, A., Bergaliyev, M., Tinyakov, S., Krinkin, K., and Popov, P. (2022). Using IoT Protocols in Real-Time Systems: Protocol Analysis and Evaluation of Data Transmission Characteristics. J. Comput. Networks Commun., 2022:7368691:1–7368691:18.
Gehrmann, C. and Gunnarsson, M. (2020). A Digital Twin Based Industrial Automation and Control System Security Architecture. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 16:669–680.
Gemirter, C. B., Senturca, C., and Baydere, S. (2021). A Comparative Evaluation of AMQP, MQTT and HTTP Protocols Using Real-Time Public Smart City Data. In 2021 6th International Conference on Computer Science and Engineering (UBMK), pages 542–547.
Liang, C.-J., McGee, W., Menassa, C., and Kamat, V. (2020). Bi-Directional Communication Bridge for State Synchronization between Digital Twin Simulations and Physical Construction Robots. In Proceedings of the 37th International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction (ISARC), pages 1480–1487, Kitakyushu, Japan. International Association for Automation and Robotics in Construction (IAARC).
Liang, W.-Y., Yuan, Y., and Lin, H.-J. (2023). A Performance Study on the Throughput and Latency of Zenoh, MQTT, Kafka, and DDS. ArXiv, abs/2303.09419.
Liu, M., Fang, S., Dong, H., and Xu, C. (2020). Review of digital twin about concepts, technologies, and industrial applications. Journal of Manufacturing Systems.
Luzuriaga, J. E., Perez, M., Boronat, P., Cano, J. C., Calafate, C., and Manzoni, P. (2015). A comparative evaluation of AMQP and MQTT protocols over unstable and mobile networks. In 2015 12th Annual IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC), pages 931–936.
Mishra, B., Mishra, B., and Kertész, A. (2021). Stress-Testing MQTT Brokers: A Comparative Analysis of Performance Measurements. Energies.
Naik, N. (2017). Choice of effective messaging protocols for IoT systems: MQTT, CoAP, AMQP and HTTP. In 2017 IEEE International Systems Engineering Symposium (ISSE), pages 1–7.
Peeroo, K., Popov, P., and Stankovic, V. (2023). A Survey on Experimental Performance Evaluation of Data Distribution Service (DDS) Implementations. ArXiv, abs/2310.16630.
Rovere, D., Pedrazzoli, P., dal Maso, G., Alge, M., and Ciavotta, M. (2018). The Digital Shopfloor - Industrial Automation in the Industry 4.0 Era, chapter A Centralized Support Infrastructure (CSI) to Manage CPS Digital Twin, towards the Synchronization between CPS Deployed on the Shopfloor and Their Digital Representation, page 19. Imprint River Publishers.
Silva, D. M. A., Carvalho, L., Soares, J. A. M., and Sofia, R. C. (2021). A Performance Analysis of Internet of Things Networking Protocols: Evaluating MQTT, CoAP, OPC UA. Applied Sciences, 11:4879.
Solpan, S. and Kucuk, K. (2022). DDS-XRCE Standard Performance Evaluation of Different Communication Scenarios in IoT Technologies. EAI Endorsed Transactions on Internet of Things.
Somma, A., Amalfitano, D., Benedictis, A. D., and Pelliccione, P. (2025). TwinArch: A Digital Twin Reference Architecture. ArXiv, abs/2504.07530.
Song, H., Qin, F., Martinez-Julia, P., Ciavaglia, L., and Wang, A. (2022). Network Telemetry Framework. RFC 9232.
Wytrebowicz, J., Cabaj, K., and Krawiec, J. (2021). Messaging Protocols for IoT Systems—A Pragmatic Comparison. Sensors (Basel, Switzerland), 21.
Xu, H., Wu, J., Pan, Q., Guan, X., and Guizani, M. (2023). A Survey on Digital Twin for Industrial Internet of Things: Applications, Technologies and Tools. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, pages 1–1.
Yoshino, D., Watanobe, Y., and Naruse, K. (2021). A Highly Reliable Communication System for Internet of Robotic Things and Implementation in RT-Middleware With AMQP Communication Interfaces. IEEE Access, 9:167229–167241.
Yu, J., Chen, C., Zhang, C., and Ji, W. (2025). Real-Time Monitoring and Dynamic Interaction Methods Based on Digital Twin Workshop Theory. Processes.
Zhang, J., Yu, X., Ha, S., Queralta, J. P., and Westerlund, T. (2023). Comparison of DDS, MQTT, and Zenoh in Edge-to-Edge and Edge-to-Cloud Communication for Distributed ROS 2 Systems. ArXiv.
Zhou, C., Chen, D., Martinez-Julia, P., and Ma, Q. (2023). Data Collection Requirements and Technologies for Digital Twin Network. Internet-Draft draft-zcz-nmrg-digitaltwin-data-collection-03, Internet Engineering Task Force. Work in Progress.
Akbarian, F., Fitzgerald, E., and Kihl, M. (2020). Synchronization in Digital Twins for Industrial Control Systems. ArXiv, abs/2006.03447.
Alghamdi, W. (2024). Synchronization Patterns for Digital Twin Systems. Journal of Applied Data Sciences.
Bezerra, W. R., Koch, F., and Westphall, C. B. (2024). Performance of security options for message protocols: A comparative analysis. International Journal of Network Management, 34.
Caiza, G. and Sanz, R. (2023). Digital Twin to Control and Monitor an Industrial Cyber-Physical Environment Supported by Augmented Reality. Applied Sciences.
Chovet, L., Garcia, G. M., Bera, A., Richard, A., Yoshida, K., and Olivares-Méndez, M. (2024). Performance Comparison of ROS2 Middlewares for Multi-robot Mesh Networks in Planetary Exploration. Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems, 111.
Corte, L. L., Rashid, S. A., and Dan, A.-M. (2025). Performance Evaluation of Brokerless Messaging Libraries. ArXiv, abs/2508.07934.
Dihan, M. S., Akash, A. I., Tasneem, Z., Das, P., Das, S. K., Islam, M. R., Islam, M. M., Badal, F., Ali, M. F., Ahmed, M. H., Abhi, S. H., Sarker, S., and Hasan, M. (2024). Digital twin: Data exploration, architecture, implementation and future. Heliyon, 10.
Dizdarevic, J., Michalke, M., and Jukan, A. (2023). Engineering and Experimentally Benchmarking Open Source MQTT Broker Implementations. ArXiv, abs/2305.13893.
do Carmo, P. R., de Freitas Bezerra, D., Filho, A. T. O., Freitas, E., Silva, M. L., Dantas, M., Oliveira, B., Kelner, J., Sadok, D. F., and Souza, R. (2024). Living on the edge: A survey of Digital Twin-Assisted Task Offloading in safety-critical environments. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 232:104024.
Ferko, E., Bucaioni, A., and Behnam, M. (2022). Architecting Digital Twins. IEEE Access, PP:1–1.
Filho, A. O. O., Barbosa, G. B. N., Rodrigues, I., Cani, C., Kelner, J., Sadok, D., and Souza, R. S. (2022). Experimental network performance evaluation for human-robot interaction collision detection using cameras. Research, Society and Development.
Freitas, E., de Oliveira Filho, A. T., do Carmo, P. R. X., Sadok, D., and Kelner, J. (2026). Digital Twin Synchronization: towards a data-centric architecture. arXiv, abs/2601.23051.
Fuller, A., Fan, Z., Day, C., and Barlow, C. (2020). Digital Twin: Enabling Technologies, Challenges and Open Research. IEEE Access, 8:108952–108971.
Gamess, E., Ford, T. N., and Trifas, M. (2021). Performance Evaluation of a Widely Used Implementation of the MQTT Protocol with Large Payloads in Normal Operation and under a DoS Attack. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Southeast Conference, ACM SE ’21, page 154–162, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery.
Gavrilov, A., Bergaliyev, M., Tinyakov, S., Krinkin, K., and Popov, P. (2022). Using IoT Protocols in Real-Time Systems: Protocol Analysis and Evaluation of Data Transmission Characteristics. J. Comput. Networks Commun., 2022:7368691:1–7368691:18.
Gehrmann, C. and Gunnarsson, M. (2020). A Digital Twin Based Industrial Automation and Control System Security Architecture. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 16:669–680.
Gemirter, C. B., Senturca, C., and Baydere, S. (2021). A Comparative Evaluation of AMQP, MQTT and HTTP Protocols Using Real-Time Public Smart City Data. In 2021 6th International Conference on Computer Science and Engineering (UBMK), pages 542–547.
Liang, C.-J., McGee, W., Menassa, C., and Kamat, V. (2020). Bi-Directional Communication Bridge for State Synchronization between Digital Twin Simulations and Physical Construction Robots. In Proceedings of the 37th International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction (ISARC), pages 1480–1487, Kitakyushu, Japan. International Association for Automation and Robotics in Construction (IAARC).
Liang, W.-Y., Yuan, Y., and Lin, H.-J. (2023). A Performance Study on the Throughput and Latency of Zenoh, MQTT, Kafka, and DDS. ArXiv, abs/2303.09419.
Liu, M., Fang, S., Dong, H., and Xu, C. (2020). Review of digital twin about concepts, technologies, and industrial applications. Journal of Manufacturing Systems.
Luzuriaga, J. E., Perez, M., Boronat, P., Cano, J. C., Calafate, C., and Manzoni, P. (2015). A comparative evaluation of AMQP and MQTT protocols over unstable and mobile networks. In 2015 12th Annual IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC), pages 931–936.
Mishra, B., Mishra, B., and Kertész, A. (2021). Stress-Testing MQTT Brokers: A Comparative Analysis of Performance Measurements. Energies.
Naik, N. (2017). Choice of effective messaging protocols for IoT systems: MQTT, CoAP, AMQP and HTTP. In 2017 IEEE International Systems Engineering Symposium (ISSE), pages 1–7.
Peeroo, K., Popov, P., and Stankovic, V. (2023). A Survey on Experimental Performance Evaluation of Data Distribution Service (DDS) Implementations. ArXiv, abs/2310.16630.
Rovere, D., Pedrazzoli, P., dal Maso, G., Alge, M., and Ciavotta, M. (2018). The Digital Shopfloor - Industrial Automation in the Industry 4.0 Era, chapter A Centralized Support Infrastructure (CSI) to Manage CPS Digital Twin, towards the Synchronization between CPS Deployed on the Shopfloor and Their Digital Representation, page 19. Imprint River Publishers.
Silva, D. M. A., Carvalho, L., Soares, J. A. M., and Sofia, R. C. (2021). A Performance Analysis of Internet of Things Networking Protocols: Evaluating MQTT, CoAP, OPC UA. Applied Sciences, 11:4879.
Solpan, S. and Kucuk, K. (2022). DDS-XRCE Standard Performance Evaluation of Different Communication Scenarios in IoT Technologies. EAI Endorsed Transactions on Internet of Things.
Somma, A., Amalfitano, D., Benedictis, A. D., and Pelliccione, P. (2025). TwinArch: A Digital Twin Reference Architecture. ArXiv, abs/2504.07530.
Song, H., Qin, F., Martinez-Julia, P., Ciavaglia, L., and Wang, A. (2022). Network Telemetry Framework. RFC 9232.
Wytrebowicz, J., Cabaj, K., and Krawiec, J. (2021). Messaging Protocols for IoT Systems—A Pragmatic Comparison. Sensors (Basel, Switzerland), 21.
Xu, H., Wu, J., Pan, Q., Guan, X., and Guizani, M. (2023). A Survey on Digital Twin for Industrial Internet of Things: Applications, Technologies and Tools. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, pages 1–1.
Yoshino, D., Watanobe, Y., and Naruse, K. (2021). A Highly Reliable Communication System for Internet of Robotic Things and Implementation in RT-Middleware With AMQP Communication Interfaces. IEEE Access, 9:167229–167241.
Yu, J., Chen, C., Zhang, C., and Ji, W. (2025). Real-Time Monitoring and Dynamic Interaction Methods Based on Digital Twin Workshop Theory. Processes.
Zhang, J., Yu, X., Ha, S., Queralta, J. P., and Westerlund, T. (2023). Comparison of DDS, MQTT, and Zenoh in Edge-to-Edge and Edge-to-Cloud Communication for Distributed ROS 2 Systems. ArXiv.
Zhou, C., Chen, D., Martinez-Julia, P., and Ma, Q. (2023). Data Collection Requirements and Technologies for Digital Twin Network. Internet-Draft draft-zcz-nmrg-digitaltwin-data-collection-03, Internet Engineering Task Force. Work in Progress.
Publicado
25/05/2026
Como Citar
FREITAS, Eduardo; OLIVEIRA FILHO, Assis T. de; CARMO, Pedro R. X. do; DANTAS, Marrone; KELNER, Judith; SADOK, Djamel.
Data distribution performance for Digital Twin Synchronization: an experimental evaluation. In: WORKSHOP DE GERÊNCIA E OPERAÇÃO DE REDES E SERVIÇOS (WGRS), 31. , 2026, Praia do Forte/BA.
Anais [...].
Porto Alegre: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação,
2026
.
p. 71-84.
ISSN 2595-2722.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/wgrs.2026.23232.
