Towards a Bandwidth Market for the Metaverse

The metaverse introduces new challenges to the Internet infrastructure and architecture. While virtual reality (VR) applications on mobile devices dominate the current projections, their Quality of Service (QoS) requirements result in increased demand in global low-latency and local high-bandwidth connections. With the introduction of new Internet architectures, the procurement of bandwidth which guarantees such QoS requirements becomes feasible. Time, location and application-dependent QoS requirements and different budgets of user applications create the competition for such bandwidth resources. As such, a market for routing paths and their bandwidth helps to resolve the competition among user applications by determining the market prices and allocations for all demanded links. This work establishes such a market model by leveraging a Fisher market in which prices and fair allocation are determined. To enable the global, cross-jurisdictional nature of connectivity, a distributed solution for global connectivity is presented through a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain, enabling optimal updates for selfish buyers and feasible prices and bandwidth allocations at every step.