Optimal Mobility-Aware Wireless Edge Cloud Support for the Metaverse

Mobile-augmented-reality (MAR) applications extended into the metaverse could provide mixed and immersive experiences by amalgamating the virtual and physical worlds. However, the consideration of joining MAR and the metaverse requires reliable and high-quality support for foreground interactions and rich background content from these applications, which intensifies their consumption of energy, caching and computing resources. To tackle these challenges, a more flexible request assignment and resource allocation framework with more efficient processing are proposed in this paper through anchoring decomposed metaverse AR services at different edge nodes and proactively caching background metaverse region models embedded with target augmented-reality objects (AROs). Advanced terminals are also considered to further reduce service delays at an acceptable energy-consumption cost. We, then, propose and solve a joint-optimization problem which explicitly considers the balance between service delay and energy consumption under the constraints of perceived user quality in a mobility event. By also explicitly taking into account the capabilities of user terminals, the proposed optimized scheme is compared to a terminal-oblivious scheme. According to a wide set of numerical investigations, the proposed scheme has wide-ranging advantages in service latency and energy efficiency over other nominal baseline schemes which neglect the capabilities of terminals, user physical mobility, service decomposition and the inherent multimodality of the metaverse MAR service.