The term ‘Metaverse’ often denotes a wide range of existing and fictional applications. Nevertheless, there are actual systems today that can be studied and analyzed. However, whereas a considerable body of work has been published on applications and application ideas, there is less work on the technical implementation of such systems, especially from a networked systems perspective.

In a recently published open access journal article, we share some insights into the technical design of Metaverse systems, their key technologies, and their shortcomings, predominantly from a networked systems perspective. For the scope of this study, we define the ‘Metaverse’ as follows. The ‘Metaverse’ encompasses various current and emerging technologies, and the term is used to describe different applications, ranging from Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR),and Extended Reality (XR) to a new form of the Internet or Web. A key feature distinguishing the Metaverse from simple AR/VR is its inherently collaborative and shared nature, enabling interaction and collaboration among users in a virtual environment.

Building on Existing Platforms and Network Stacks

Most current Metaverse systems and designs are built on existing technologies and networks. For example, massively multiplayer online games such as Fortnite use a generalized client-server model. In this model, the server authoritatively manages the game state, while the client maintains a local subset of this state and can predict game flow by executing the same game code as the server on approximately the same data. Servers send information about the game world to clients by replicating relevant actors and their properties. Commercial social VR platforms such as Horizon Worlds and AltspaceVR use HTTPS to report client-side information and synchronize in-game clocks across users.

Mozilla Hubs, built with A-Frame (a web framework for building virtual reality experiences), uses WebRTC communication with a Selective Forwarding Unit (SFU). The SFU receives multiple audio and video data streams from its peers, then determines and forwards relevant data streams to connected peers. Blockchain or Non-Fungible Token (NFT)-based online games, such as Decentraland, run exclusively on the client side but allow for various data flow models, ranging from local effects and traditional client-server architectures to peer-to-peer (P2P) interactions based on state channels; Upland is built on EOSIO, an open-source blockchain protocol for scalable decentralized applications, and transports data through HTTPS. Connections between peers in Upland are established using TLS or VPN tunnels.

Many studies have focused on improving various aspects of Metaverse systems. For example, EdgeXAR is a mobile AR framework using edge offloading to enable lightweight tracking with six degrees of freedom (DOF) while reducing offloading delay from the user’s view; SORAS is an optimal resource allocation scheme for edgeenabled Metaverse, using stochastic integer programming to minimize the total network cost; Ibrahim et al. explores the issue of partial computation offloading for multiple subtasks in an in-network computing environment, aiming to minimize energy consumption and delay. However, these ideas for offloading computation and rendering tasks to edge platforms often conflict with the existing end-to-end transport protocols and overlay deployment models. Recently, a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based multipath network orchestration framework designed for remote healthcare services is presented, automating subflow management to handle multipath networks. However, proposals for scalable multi-party communication would require interdomain multicast services, unavailable on today’s Internet.

Disconnect Between High-Level Concepts and Actual Systems

In practice, there is a significant disconnect between high-level Metaverse concepts, ideas for technical improvements, and systems that are actually developed and partially deployed. A 2022 ACM IMC paper titled Are we ready for metaverse?: a measurement study of social virtual reality platforms analyzes the performance of various social VR systems, pinpointing numerous issues related to performance, communication overhead, and scalability. These issues are primarily due to the fact that current systems leverage existing platforms, protocols, and system architectures, which cannot tap into any of the proposed architectural and technical enhancements, such as scalable multi-party communication, offloading computation, rendering tasks, etc.

Rather than merely layering ‘the Metaverse’ on top of legacy and not always ideal foundations, we consider Metaverse as a driver for future network and web applications and actively develop new designs to that end. In our article, we take a comprehensive systems approach and technically describe current Metaverse systems, focusing on their networking aspects. We document the requirements and challenges of Metaverse systems and propose a principled approach to system design for these requirements and challenges based on a thorough understanding of the needs of Metaverse systems, the current constraints and limitations, and the potential solutions of Internet technologies.

Article Overview

1. We present a technical description of the ‘Metaverse’ based on existing and emerging systems, including a discussion of its fundamental properties, applications, and architectural models.
2. We comprehensively study relevant enabling technologies for Metaverse systems, including HCI/XR technologies, networking, communications, media encoding, simulation, real-time rendering and AI. We also discuss current Metaverse system architectures and the integration of these technologies into actual applications.
3. We conduct a detailed requirements analysis for constructing Metaverse systems. We analyze applications specific requirements and identify existing gaps in four key aspects: communication performance, mobility, large-scale operation,and end system architecture. For each area, we propose candidate technologies to address these gaps.
4. We propose a research agenda for future Metaverse systems, based on our gap analysis and candidate technologies discussion. We re-assess the fundamental goals and requirements, without necessarily being constrained by existing system architectures and protocols. Based on a comprehensive understanding of what Metaverse systems need and what end-systems, devices, networks and communication services can theoretically provide, we propose specific design ideas and future research directions to realize Metaverse systems that can meet the expectations often articulated in the literature.

References

• Y. Zhang, D. Kutscher and Y. Cui; Networked Metaverse Systems: Foundations, Gaps, Research Directions; in IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society, doi: 10.1109/OJCOMS.2024.3426098.
• Tianyuan Yu, Xinyu Ma, Varun Patil, Yekta Kocaogullar, Yulong Zhang, Jeff Burke, Dirk Kutscher, Lixia Zhang; Secure Web Objects: Building Blocks for Metaverse Interoperability and Decentralization; IEEE MetaCom 2024; August 12-14 2024; Hong Kong, China
• Dirk Kutscher, Jeff Burke, Giuseppe Fioccola, Paulo Mendes;
  Statement: The Metaverse as an Information-Centric Network; 10th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ACM ICN '23); October 9 — 10, 2023, Reykjavik, Iceland
• Giuseppe Fioccola , Paulo Mendes , Jeff Burke , Dirk Kutscher;
  Information-Centric Metaverse; Internet Draft draft-fmbk-icnrg-metaverse-01; Work in Progress; July 2023

In our upcoming paper at IEEE Metacom-2024, we propose a data-oriented approach for future Web and Metaverse system designs.

Abstract

This position paper explores how to support the Web's evolution through an underlying data-centric approach that better matches the data-orientedness of modern and emerging applications. We revisit the original vision of the Web as a hypermedia system that supports document composability and application interoperability via name-based data access. We propose the use of secure web objects (SWO), a data-oriented communication approach that can reduce complexity, centrality, and inefficiency, particularly for collaborative and local-first applications, such as the Metaverse and other collaborative applications. SWO are named, signed, application-defined objects that are secured independently of their containers or communications channels, an approach that leverages the results from over a decade-long data-centric networking research. This approach does not require intermediation by aggregators of identity, storage, and other services that are common today. We present a brief design overview, illustrated through prototypes for two editors of shared hypermedia documents: one for 3D and one for LaTeX. We also discuss our findings and suggest a roadmap for future research.

References

• Tianyuan Yu, Xinyu Ma, Varun Patil, Yekta Kocaogullar, Yulong Zhang, Jeff Burke, Dirk Kutscher, Lixia Zhang; Secure Web Objects: Building Blocks for Metaverse Interoperability and Decentralization; IEEE MetaCom 2024, pre-print: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.15221

• Dirk Kutscher; Data-oriented, Decentralized, Daring: Opportunities and Research Challenges for an Information-Centric Web; Lightning Talk at NDNComm 2024; March 2024

• Navin V. Keizer, Onur Ascigil, Michał Król, Dirk Kutscher, and George Pavlou; A Survey on Content Retrieval on the Decentralised Web; ACM Computing Surveys; March 2024; https://doi.org/10.1145/3649132

• Dirk Kutscher, Jeff Burke, Giuseppe Fioccola, Paulo Mendes;
  Statement: The Metaverse as an Information-Centric Network; 10th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ACM ICN '23); October 9 — 10, 2023, Reykjavik, Iceland; https://doi.org/10.1145/3623565.3623761

This is an introduction to our paper:

• Dirk Kutscher, Jeff Burke, Giuseppe Fioccola, Paulo Mendes; Statement: The Metaverse as an Information-Centric Network; 10th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ACM ICN '23); October 9 — 10, 2023, Reykjavik, Iceland; https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3623565.3623761; pre-print available at http://arxiv.org/abs/2309.09147

The Web Today

The Web today has a specific technical definition: it includes presentation layer technologies, protocols, agreed-upon ways of achieving certain semantics such as Representational State Transfer (REST), and security infrastructure. However, from a user perspective, it can be viewed as a universe of consistently navigable content and (occasionally) interoperable services. The user experience and architectural underpinnings have evolved in parallel and have influenced each other: for many end users, the Web and the network are synonymous. Rather than building up "Metaverse" as an application domain based on IP, we aim to explore "the Metaverse" as strongly intertwined with ICN, just as the modern concept of the Web and its technology stack are inseparable for a broad set of applications.

As a placeholder name for a range of new technologies and experiences, "the Metaverse" is even less well-defined than the Web. We adopt the commonly used concept of a shared, interoperable, and persistent XR. Some descriptions and early prototypes for social AR/VR systems suggest leveraging existing Internet and Web protocols to provide Metaverse services, without addressing the technical complexity and centralization of control required to provide the underlying cloud service infrastructure.

Metaverse as an Information-Centric Concept

Here, we do not take as given current designs and deployment models that consider the Metaverse as an overlay application with corresponding infrastructure dependencies, as this exacerbates the current gaps (and the resulting costs and technical complexity) between distributed applications and the underlying network architecture. Instead, we assume a fundamentally information/centric system in which most applications participate in granular 3D content exchange, context-aware integration with the physical world, and other Metaverse-relevant services.

"The Metaverse" is an information-centric concept that likely will become synonymous with the network itself. We argue that reciprocal design of the network and applications will open new opportunities for the deployment of Metaverse-suggestive experiences even today.

Experientially, this Metaverse is an extension of the Web into immersive XR modalities that are often aligned with physical space, as in augmented reality (AR). We conceive the Metaverse not only as a shared XR environment, but the next generation of the web, extending into 3D interaction/immersion and optionally overlaid on physical spaces. Instead of rendering data objects into a 2D page (within a tab within a window) on a device, we envision such objects being rendered into a shared 3D space, interacting among each other and with end users.

Architecturally, leveraging ICN concepts provides support for decentralized publishing, content interoperability and co-existence, based on general building blocks and not within separated application silos as today's initial prototypes. We claim that such properties are required to achieve the generally circulated visions of Metaverse systems, but are not achievable today because of the host- and connection-centric way in which the web operates and is presented to users in browsers.

ICN Capabilities

We point out four ICN capabilities critical to Metaverse concepts:

1. scalable and robust multi-destination communication, overcoming IP multicast challenges, such as inter-domain routing, scalability, and routing communication overhead;
2. leveraging wireless broadcast to support shared local views and low-latency interactivity without application-awareness in edge routers;
3. privacy, selective attention, content filtering, and autonomous interactions, as well as ownership and control on the publishing side; and
4. supporting in-network processing for objects replication and transformation.

Interactive Holographic Communication

For example, imagine interactive holographic communication consisting of participants' 3D video, spatial audio, and shared 3D documents. In ICN, such an application can represent virtual content as secure data objects and share them efficiently in a larger group of peers, fetching only the data necessary to reconstruct a suitable representation while being aware of the constraints of user devices and access networks.

Furthermore, while experiencing 3D objects shared by the group, each participant may also interact in the same XR environment with personal services such as wayfinding, messaging, and Internet of Things (IoT) device status. Interactions between private and shared 3D objects would be simplified if these objects use similar conventions but with different security. This concept is semantically well-aligned with ICN properties, particularly for security, as it revolves around object-level data exchange rather than hosts or channels. Integration and interoperability within a shared XR environment, without centralization, is challenging if one has to negotiate not only data interactions but also the underlying service connections and security relationship using host-centric paradigms. It also exacerbates the impact of intermittent connectivity on interactivity when the global network is required for functions such as rendezvous -- that are handled locally in ICN.

Creating Shared Environments

As a second example, consider creating a shared environment -- e.g., to pre-visualize engineering models of an aircraft – from a collection of collaboratively edited 3D documents. Imagine component documents interacting in a simulation. Documents can be modularized, linked, and overlaid in a web-like manner. Today, such cross-platform interoperability and visualization without centralized hubs is impractical, and it is difficult to create secure, granular data flows required for interaction between co-existing 3D elements to "bring them to life" in a virtual world. In an ICN approach, such modules could be independently authored and published, shared between applications, becoming building blocks of a richer, interacting system of user- and machine-generated content.

We introduce some technical challenges and research direction in our paper (link below).

Further Reading

The Metaverse as an Information-Centric Network

• Dirk Kutscher, Jeff Burke, Giuseppe Fioccola, Paulo Mendes; Statement: The Metaverse as an Information-Centric Network; 10th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ACM ICN '23); October 9 — 10, 2023, Reykjavik, Iceland; https://doi.org/10.1145/3623565.3623712; pre-print available at http://arxiv.org/abs/2309.09147
• Giuseppe Fioccola , Paulo Mendes , Jeff Burke , Dirk Kutscher;
  Information-Centric Metaverse; Internet Draft draft-fmbk-icnrg-metaverse-01; Work in Progress; July 2023
• Jeff Burke, Lixia Zhang, Dirk Kutscher; Named Data Microverse project
• Dirk Kutscher, Jeff Burke, Paulo Mendes, Michelle Munson, Todd Hodes; Named Data Metaverse Panel at NDNComm-2023
• Dirk Kutscher, Lixia Zhang, Jeff Burke, Dave Oran; IEEE MetaCom Workshop on Decentralized, Data-Oriented Networking for the Metaverse (DORM); IEEE Metacom-2023
• Dirk Kutscher, Dave Oran; Statement: RESTful Information-Centric Networking; ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN 2022); Osaka, Japan; September 2022; https://dirk-kutscher.info/publications/icn-rest/

References

• Cheng, R., Wu, N., Varvello, M., Chen, S., and Han, B; Are we ready for metaverse?: a measurement study of social virtual reality platforms; In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC 2022, Nice, France; October 25-27, 2022 (2022); https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3517745.3561417
• Erickson, L; Interoperability in the immersive web – part 1; https://hubs.mozilla.com/labs/interoperability-in-the-immersive-web/, Feb 2023.
• Fielding, R. T.; Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures; PhD thesis, University of California, Irvine, 2000. http://www.ics.uci.edu/fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm
• Gruessing, J., and Dawkins, S; Media over quic - use cases and requirements for media transport protocol design; Internet-Draft https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-moq-requirements/, version 01; IETF Secretariat, July 2023.
• Jennings, C. F., Nandakumar, S., and Huitema, C. Quicr – media delivery protocol over quic. Internet-Draft https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-jennings-moq-quicr-proto/, version 01, IETF Secretariat, January 2023.
• LAMINA1. Decentralized system services for the open metaverse; https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/63fe332d7b9ae4159d741e55/64499d8f08bd5bdd1fe6bce1_MaaS_Whitepaper_v1.0.pdf
• Moll, P., Patil, V., Wang, L., and Zhang, L.; The evolution of distributed dataset synchronization solutions in NDN: sok; In 9th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking; ICN 2022; Osaka Japan; September 19-21, 2022 (2022); https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3517212.3558092
• Moore, M. B. T.; How we ruined the internet; CoRR abs/2306.01101 (2023); https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.01101
• NVIDIA. What is universal scene description; https://developer.nvidia.com/usd.
• Oran, D. R.; Considerations in the Development of a QoS Architecture for CCNx-Like Information-Centric Networking Protocols; RFC 9064; June 2021; https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9064/
• Patil, V., Desai, H., and Zhang, L; Kua: A distributed object store over named data networking; In Conference on Information-Centric Networking, ICN 2022, Osaka Japan, September 19-21, 2022 (2022); https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3517212.3558083
• Radoff, J.; Metaverse interoperability, part 1: Challenges. https://medium.com/building-the-metaverse/metaverse-interoperabilitypart-1-challenges-716455ca439e, Apr 2022.
• Khronos Group; glTF runtime 3d asset delivery; https://www.khronos.org/gltf/
• Yu, Y., Afanasyev, A., Clark, D., claffy, k., Jacobson, V., and Zhang, L.; Schematizing trust in named data networking; In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (New York, NY, USA, 2015), ACMICN ’15, Association for Computing Machinery; https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2810156.2810170

Our project proposal on Named Data Microverse was selected as a winner of the Future of Data Challenge

The Named Data Microverse project explores how Information-Centric Networking (ICN) can enable a free, open and decentralized approach to “the metaverse”. The project aims to balances scalability and market-based innovation with democratization, trustworthiness, and equitable empowerment of individuals. ICN provides an architectural foundation for secure, distributed applications to be created more easily and provides resilience in natural disasters, better mobility support, cloud-optional local communication, improved privacy, and other benefits that are not addressed solely by “Web3” technologies.

This is a joint project with Jeff Burke and Lixia Zhang at UCLA.

I had the pleasure of chairing a really interesting panel discussion at the NDN Community meeting (NDNComm 2023) on March 3rd 2023.

The panel discussed opportunities and challenges for building Metaverse systems with a Named Data Networking approach. Specific discussion questions include:

• What are architectural, security-related, and performance-related issues in Metaverse systems today?
• What communication patterns could be supported by NDN platforms?
• How can the data-oriented model and decentralized trust establishment help in developing better Metaverse systems and at what layer would NDN technologies help?
• What are gaps, challenges and research opportunities for NDN evolution to address Metaverse system requirements?

The panelists were:

• Paulo Mendes (Airbus Research)
• Michelle Munson (Eluvio)
• Todd Hodes (Eluvio)
• Jeff Burke (UCLA REMAP)

The panel discussed scenarios for Named Data in the Metaverse such as AR in live performance, real-time ML for transformed reality, architectures for emerging arts, media, and entertainment, commercial content distribution and experience delivery, as well as Metaverse VR experiences in challenged networks.

Jeff Burke introduced exciting ideas for re-imaging VR-enhanced live performances and shared some ideas and insights from building such applications. In his class of applications, there is a lot of local interaction (for example in a theater), creating interesting challenges and opportunities for local, decentralized Metaverses. On the application layer, Metaverse VR applications would like use scene and model descriptions such as USD and gITF, so the question arises, what opportunities exist for mapping the corresponding names to "network layer" names.

Michelle Munson and Todd Hodes introduced Eluvio's Content Fabric Protocol (CFP), a platform aimed at commercial-grade decentralized content distribition, providing content-native adressability programmability mechanisms for storage, distribution, and in-built streaming and content processing. CFP uses Blockchain governance for versioning, access control, and on-chain/cross-chain monetization. An example use case is the Warner Movieverse.

The panel discussed the different approaches of dealing with named-data as a fundamental building block and some specific use cases for networked Metaverse systems such as (secure) in-network content transformation. Overall, the panel was a great initial discussion on these ideas that should definitely be continued. Check out the list of related events below for possible venues.

Related Events

• Metaverse-focused ICN Research Group meeting at the upcoming IETF-116 meeting: (ICNRG meets on March 28, 09:30 to 11:00 JST, online participation possible).
• Metaverse side meeting at IETF-116 on March 30th at 11:30. See IETF Metaverse mailing list for agenda and details.
• IEEE MetaCom Workshop on Decentralized, Data-Oriented Networking for the Metaverse (DORM)

IEEE MetaCom Workshop on Decentralized, Data-Oriented Networking for the Metaverse (DORM)

Workshop page at IEEE MetaCom

Organizers

• Jeff Burke, UCLA
• Dirk Kutscher, HKUST(GZ)
• Dave Oran, Network Systems Research & Design
• Lixia Zhang, UCLA

Workshop Description

The DORM workshop is a forum to explore new directions and early research results on Metaverse system architecture, protocols, and security, along a data-oriented design direction that can encourage and facilitate decentralized realizations. Here we broadly interpret the phrase “Metaverse” as a new phase of networking with multi-dimensional shared views in open realms.

Most prototype implementations of such systems today replicate the social media platform model: they run on cloud servers offered by a small number of providers, and have identities and trust management anchored at these servers. Consequently, all communications are mediated through such servers, together with extensive CDN overlay infrastructures or the equivalent.

Although the cloud services may be extended to edges to address performance and delay issues, the centralization of control power that stems from this cloud-centric approach can be problematic from a societal perspective. It also reflects a significant semantic mismatch between the existing address-based network support and many aspirations for open realm applications and interoperability: the applications, by and large, operate on named data principles at the application layer, but need to deploy multiple layers of middleware services, which are provider-specific, to bridge the gap. These added complexities prohibit new ways of interacting (leveraging new data formats such as USD and gITF) and are not conducive to flexible distributed computing in the edge-to-cloud continuum.

This workshop solicits efforts that explore new directions in metaverse realization and work that takes a principled approach to key topics in the areas of 1) Networking as the Platform, 2) Objects and Experiences, and 3) Trust and Transactions without being constrained by inherited platforms.

Networking as the Platform

Metaverse systems will rely on a variety of communication patterns such as client-server RPC, massively scalable multi-destination communication, publish-subscribe etc. In systems that are designed with a cloud-based, centralized architecture in mind, such interactions are typically mediated by central servers and supported by overlay CDN infrastructure, with operational inflexibility and lacking optimization mechanisms, for example in order to leverage specific network link layer capabilities such as broadcast/multicast features. Underlying reliance on existing stacks also introduces familiar complications in providing disruption-tolerant, mobile-friendly extended reality applications, limiting their viability for eventual use in critical infrastructure and require significant engineering support to use in demanding entertainment applications, such as large-scale live events.

This workshop seeks research on new strategies for Metaverse system design that can promote innovation by lowering barriers to entry for new applications that perform robustly under a variety of conditions. We solicit research on Metaverse system design that addresses architectural and protocol-level issues without the reliance on a centralized cloud-based architecture. Instead, we expect the DORM workshop submissions to start with a distributed system assumption, focusing on individual protocol and security elements that enable decentralized Metaverse realizations.

Many Metaverse-relevant interactions such as video streaming and distribution of event data today inherently rely on abstractions for accessing named data objects such as video chunks, for example in DASH-based video streaming. The DORM workshop will therefore particularly invite contributions that explore new systems and protocol designs that leverage that principle, thus exploring new opportunities to re-imagine the relationship between application/network and link/physical layer protocols in order to better support Metaverse system implementations. This could include work on new hypermedia concepts based on the named data principle and cross-layer designs for simplifying and optimizing the implementation and operation of such protocols.

We expect such systems to as well be better suited to elegant, efficient integration of computing into the network, thus providing more flexible and adaptive platforms for offloading computation and supporting more elaborate data dissemination strategies.

From Objects to Experiences

In our perceived Metaverse/open realm systems, there are different existing and emerging media representations and encodings such as current video encodings as well as scene and 3D object description and transmission formats such as USD and glTF. Similar to previous developments in the networked audio/video area, it is interesting to investigate opportunities for new scene and 3D object representation formats that are suitable not only for efficient creation and file-like unidirectional transmission but also for streaming, granular composition and access, de-structuring, efficient multi-destination transmission, possibly using network coding techniques.

The workshop is therefore soliciting contributions that explore a holistic approach to media/object representation within network/distributed computing, enabling better performance, composability and robustness of future distributed Metaverse systems. Submissions that explore cross-layer approaches to supporting emerging media types such as volumetric video and neural network codecs are encouraged, as are considerations of how code implementing object behaviors and interactions can be supported - providing a path to the interoperable experiences expressed in various Metaverse visions.

Trust and Transactions

Finally, distributed open realm systems need innovative solutions in identity management and security support that enable interoperation among multiple systems including a diverse population of users. We note that mechanisms to support trust are inherently coupled with various identities, from "real world" identities to application-specific identities that users may adopt in different contexts. Proposed solutions need to consider not just media asset exchange but also the interactions among objects, and the data flows needed to support it.

The workshop solicits contributions that identify specific technical challenges, for example system bootstrapping, trust establishment, authenticated information discovery, and that propose new approaches to the identified challenges. Researchers are encouraged to consider cross-layer designs that address disconnects between layers of trust in many current systems - e.g., the reliance on third-party certificate authorities for authentications, the inherent trust in connections rather than the objects themselves, that tends to generate brittleness for even local communications if connectivity to the global network is compromised.

Call for Papers

The Decentralized Data-Oriented Networking for the Metaverse (DORM) workshop is intended as a forum to explore new directions and early research results on the system architecture, protocols, and security to support Metaverse applications, focusing on data-oriented, decentralized system designs. We view Metaverse as a new phase of networking with multi-dimensional shared views in open realms.

Most Metaverse systems today replicate the social media platform model, i.e., they assume a cloud platform provider-based system architecture where identities and the trust among them is anchored via a centralized administrative structure and where communication is mediated through servers and an extensive CDN overlay infrastructure operated by that administration. The centralization that stems from this approach can be problematic both from a control and from a performance & efficiency perspective. Despite operating on named data principles conceptually, such systems typically exhibit traditional layering approaches that prohibit new ways of interacting (leveraging new data formats such as USD and gITF) and that are not conducive for flexible distributed computing in the edge-to-cloud continuum.

This workshop solicits work that takes a principled approach at key research topics in the areas of 1) Networking as the Platform, 2) Objects and Experiences, and 3) Trust and Transactions without being constrained by inherited platform designs, including but no limited to:

• Distributed Metaverse architectures
• Computing in the network as an integral component for better communication and interaction support
• Application-layer protocols for a rich set of interaction styles in open realms
• Supporting Metaverse via data-oriented techniques
• Security, Privacy and Identity Management in Metaverse systems
• New concepts for improved network support for Metaverse systems, e.g., through facilitating ubiquitous multipath forwarding and multi-destination delivery
• Cross-layer designs
• Emerging scene description and media formats
• Quality of Experience for Metaverse applications
• Distributed consensus and state synchronization
• Security, Privacy and Identity Management in Metaverse systems

Given the breadth and emerging nature of the field, all papers should include the articulation of a specific vision of Metaverse that provides clarifying assumptions for the technical content.

Submissions and Formatting

The workshop invites submission of manuscripts with early and original research results that have not been previously published or posted on public websites or that are not currently under review by another conference or journal. Submitted manuscripts must be prepared according to IEEE Computer Society Proceedings Format (double column, 10pt font, letter paper) and submitted in the PDF format. The manuscript submitted for review should be no longer than 6 pages without references. Reviewing will be double-blind. Submissions must not reveal the authors’ names and their affiliations and avoid obvious self-references. Accepted and presented papers will be published in the IEEE MetaCom 2023 Conference Proceedings and included in IEEE Xplore.

Manuscript templates can be found here. All submissions to IEEE MetaCom 2023 must be uploaded to EasyChair at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=metacom2023.

Organization Committee

• Jeff Burke, UCLA
• Dirk Kutscher, HKUST(GZ)
• Dave Oran, Network Systems Research & Design
• Lixia Zhang, UCLA

Technical Program Committee

• Alex Afanasyev, Florida International University
• Hitoshi Asaeda, NICT
• Ali Begen, Ozyegin University
• Taejoong Chung, Virginia Tech
• Serge Fdida, Sorbonne University Paris
• Carlos Guimarães, ZettaScale Technology SARL
• Peter Gusav, UCLA
• Toru Hasagawa, Osaka University
• Jungha Hong, ETRI
• Kenji Kanai, Waseda University
• Ruidong Li, Kanazawa University
• Spyridon Mastorakis, University of Nebraska Omaha
• Kazuhisa Matsuzono, NICT
• Marie-Jose Montpetit, Concordia University Montreal
• Jörg Ott, Technical University Munich
• Yiannis Psarras, Protocol Labs
• Eve Schooler, Intel
• Tian Song, Beijing Institute of Technology
• Kazuaki Ueda, KDDI Research
• Cedric Westphal, Futurewei
• Edmund Yeh, Northeastern University
• Jiadong Yu, HKUST(GZ)
• Yu Zhang, Harbin Institute of Technology

Important Dates

• March 20, 2023, Paper submission deadline
• April 20, 2023 Notification of paper acceptance
• May 10, 2023, Camera-ready paper submissions

Submission Link

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=metacom2023