Collaborative and Verifiable VNF Management for Metaverse With Efficient Modular Designs
Dongxiao Liu, Cheng Huang, Liang Xue, Weihua Zhuang, Xuemin Shen, Bidi Ying · IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications · 2023
The metaverse is envisioned to create immersive and virtual worlds for people to experience interoperable 3D applications. However, the real-time, interactive, and multimedia characteristics of the metaverse applications require strict quality-of-service (QoS) on the underlying networking architecture, including high throughput, ultra-low delay, and human-centric service configurations. Network function virtualization (NFV)-enabled networking resource management can provide a promising solution to service-oriented QoS satisfaction for metaverse users. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based collaborative and verifiable virtualized network function (VNF) management scheme for metaverse, named BVNF+. BVNF+ enables multiple network providers across different trust domains to abstract their services as VNFs and collaboratively manage end-to-end network slices for human-centric network services in metaverse. To address the design challenge of balancing the on-chain and off-chain overheads, we decouple the computations of VNF queries into modular components based on software and hardware verifiable computation (vc) approaches. Our modular strategy can achieve on/off-chain computation and communication efficiency while keeping low usage of the secure hardware. We conduct security analysis and extensive experiments based on a real-world blockchain testing network. The analysis and experimental results demonstrate that BVNF+ is both secure and efficient as compared with the existing works.