Semantic Edge-Cloud Communication for Real-Time Urban Traffic Digital Twins

Urban traffic systems are becoming increasingly complex, demanding real-time traffic perception, proactive collision prediction, and intelligent management to improve safety and reduce congestion. Although AI-driven traffic management has shown strong promise, its success relies on diverse, high-quality data spanning critical scenarios such as collisions, near-collisions, and traffic rule violations. Digital twins offer a powerful solution by enabling synchronized virtual replicas of physical traffic environments for real-time monitoring, collision prediction, traffic-flow optimization, and diverse realistic scenario generation. However, continuously synchronizing a high-fidelity urban traffic digital twin through edge surveillance cameras requires substantial edge-cloud communication, and transmitting raw video streams leads to severe bandwidth and latency constraints. To overcome this challenge, this paper proposes a semantic communication-based edge-cloud framework for real-time urban traffic digital twin applications. By leveraging edge intelligence to extract and transmit only task-relevant semantic traffic information instead of full video feeds, the proposed framework significantly reduces communication overhead while preserving the essential dynamics needed for accurate real-time digital twin reconstruction. Experimental results demonstrate more than 99% transmission savings and an average trajectory reconstruction error of only 0.12 m, confirming the proposed framework as an effective, scalable, and low-latency solution for AI-enabled urban traffic digital twin applications.