Human-Centric Resource Allocation in the Metaverse Over Wireless Communications

The Metaverse will provide numerous immersive applications for human users, by consolidating technologies like extended reality (XR), video streaming, and cellular networks. Optimizing wireless communications to enable the human-centric Metaverse is important to satisfy the demands of mobile users. In this paper, we formulate the optimization of the system utility-cost ratio (UCR) for the Metaverse over wireless networks. Our human-centric utility measure for virtual reality (VR) applications of the Metaverse represents users’ perceptual assessment of the VR video quality as a function of the data rate and the video resolution and is learned from real datasets. The variables jointly optimized in our problem include the allocation of both communication and computation resources as well as VR video resolutions. The system cost in our problem comprises the energy consumption and delay and is non-convex with respect to the optimization variables. To solve the non-convex optimization, we develop a novel fractional programming technique, which contributes to optimization theory and has broad applicability beyond our paper. Our proposed algorithm for the system UCR optimization is computationally efficient and finds a stationary point to the constrained optimization. Through extensive simulations, our algorithm is demonstrated to outperform other approaches.

I. Introduction

The Metaverse is expected to offer a myriad of opportunities for mobile users to interact with the immersive virtual world [1]. In various Augmented/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) applications for the Metaverse, humans are at the core since users judge whether the AR/VR videos or games provide a satisfying Quality of Experience (QoE) [2]. Compared with the traditional Quality of Service (QoS) that measures the objective service performance (e.g., bit rate, data accuracy), QoE as a utility measure concerns the enjoyment of users [3]. Providing satisfying utilities to multiple users in a resource-constrained system requires allocating resources wisely. In this paper, we formulate and solve human-centric resource allocation for VR in the Metaverse over wireless communications. Our goal is to reduce the Metaverse system’s cost in terms of delay and energy, as well as to enhance the human-centric utilities of mobile users accessing the Metaverse via wireless networks. Tackling this problem also motivates us to propose a new optimization technique.