What is it about?

Wireless digital twins are virtual models of real environments that can be used to study how radio signals propagate through a city. We built HalifaxDT, a wireless digital twin of the Halifax Peninsula, using publicly available data such as building footprints, LiDAR elevation maps, building information, and spectrum records. These different data sources are combined to reconstruct the terrain and buildings and create a 3D environment for wireless ray-tracing simulations. We then use HalifaxDT to predict wireless coverage and compare it with measurements collected in Halifax. We also explore how the digital twin can provide a reference of normal radio conditions that helps reveal unexpected interference or jamming.

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Why is it important?

Detailed 3D city models are not available for many cities, which makes it difficult to build realistic wireless digital twins. HalifaxDT shows that useful city-scale wireless environments can instead be reconstructed from heterogeneous open geospatial data. An important part of the approach is keeping track of how information such as building heights was inferred and which sources supported each decision. The resulting model captures the spatial structure of measured wireless coverage more effectively than a conventional analytical propagation model and can also support applications such as interference detection. The workflow, processed data, and reconstruction tools are designed to be inspected, reused, and adapted to other cities.

Perspectives

For us, one of the most interesting aspects of this work is that Halifax becomes a reusable wireless experimentation environment. We started from open city data and field measurements and progressively connected geospatial modelling, ray tracing, wireless measurements, and spectrum monitoring. I see HalifaxDT as a platform that we can continue improving with new measurements and richer environmental information, while also using it to explore questions in wireless coverage, interference, spectrum intelligence, and resilient wireless systems.

Samer Lahoud
Dalhousie University

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This page is a summary of: HalifaxDT: A Wireless Digital Twin from Open Geospatial Data, October 2026, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3842434.3844958.
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