Service Reservation and Pricing for Green Metaverses: A Stackelberg Game Approach

Metaverse enables users to communicate, collaborate and socialize with each other through their digital avatars. Due to the spatio-temporal characteristics, co-located users are served well by performing their software components in a collaborative manner such that a Metaverse service provider (MSP) eliminates redundant data transmission and processing, ultimately reducing the total energy consumption. The energy-efficient service provision is crucial for enabling the green and sustainable Metaverse. In this article, we take an augmented reality (AR) application as an example to achieve this goal. Moreover, we study an economic issue on how the users reserve offloading services from the MSP and how the MSP determines an optimal charging price since each user is rational to decide whether to accept the offloading service by taking into account the monetary cost. A single-leader multi-follower Stackelberg game is formulated between the MSP and users while each user optimizes an offloading probability to minimize the weighted sum of time, energy consumption and monetary cost. Numerical results show that our scheme achieves energy savings and satisfies individual rationality simultaneously compared with the conventional schemes. Finally, we identify and discuss open directions on how several emerging technologies are combined with the sustainable green Metaverse.

Introduction

As a hypothesized next-generation Internet, Metaverse provides a self-sustaining, hyper spatiotemporal, and three-dimensional (3D) immersive virtual shared space for users in many areas, for example, business, entertainment, training and education. The Metaverse enables users to communicate, collaborate, and socialize with each other by using digital avatars as virtual identities [1]. To enhance user experience in Metaverse applications, innovative information and communication technologies are exploited. As one of the cornerstone technologies of Metaverse, XR including virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) is applied to provide extremely interactive and fully immersive experience for Metaverse users. 5G/B5G enhances network-wide data communications by providing higher throughput, very low latency and ubiquitous connectivity [2]. Digital twin creates a digital representation of physical objects and systems to generate a digital mirror of the real world, and aims to achieve real-time physical-virtual synchronization. Thanks to the above advancements, Metaverse can host different virtual worlds as sub-Metaverses while supporting interconnection among the sub-Metaverses to maintain a unified Metaverse and guarantee highly interactive immersive experience for the users anywhere and anytime. Nowadays, a variety of Metaverse services are provided by different Metaverse service providers (MSPs). For example, users can have a VR chat via Oculus Rift, play interesting VR/AR games such as Horizon worlds and Pokémon Go, and enjoy social activities in Minecraft and AR experience in autonomous driving. At present, the most popular way of the users to experience the Metaverse is via diverse AR/VR applications. According to current market research and statistics, AR/VR games are the most popular Metaverse application in the global market, which is predicted to reach 8 trillion dollars by 2030. Thus, we are motivated to investigate the AR application as a representative application of Metaverse. However, the number of global connected Internet of Things (loT) devices is predicted to reach 83 billion by 2024. With the increasing user density at the same location, the MSP could serve many co-located users at the same time. To avoid extra energy consumption, a few works have tried to seek energy-efficient operations, for example, caching proper data [3] and controls the frequency of data transmission and processing.