ns-3 Based High-Fidelity Simulation of an Internet of Battlefield Things Network for IFF Reliability Study and Digital Twin Candidate Assessment

We report an ns-3 simulation of an IoBT network built to quantify IFF reliability under terrain-heterogeneous LoRaWAN propagation. The testbed models a 10 × 10 km battlespace with 200 Class A end-devices, hexagonal gateway grids at five inter-gateway separations (200–7000 m), and nine terrain classes whose path-loss exponents (n = 1.8 to 4.4) come from published LoRa field measurements. A custom event-level logger captures every transmission and gateway reception at millisecond resolution; the consolidated dataset covers 3.26 × 10⁵ communication events across 45 independent campaigns. We additionally examine whether the simulation qualifies as a digital twin under the Grieves–Vickers taxonomy. It satisfies physical fidelity and state completeness, but lacks real-time synchronisation with a deployed network and full bidirectional control. We therefore label it a digital twin candidate: the fidelity prerequisites for twinning are met, and the architecture does not preclude real-time coupling once a physical IoBT testbed becomes available.