AI-Empowered Communications: Towards a Wireless Metaverse

Dear Colleagues,

The impending Metaverse, as an emergent product of the convergence of diverse technologies—encompassing extended reality (XR), artificial intelligence (AI), and beyond—necessitates the synergistic integration of these technological domains to materialize a "second life" ecosystem. Within Metaverse applications, particularly those centered on video content, AI demonstrates remarkable efficacy through its robust capabilities in feature extraction and generation. This prowess serves as a pivotal driver in redefining communication paradigms: transitioning from conventional pipeline-based media to systems anchored in semantic and feature-oriented frameworks. Such AI-empowered semantic communication is widely recognized as a transformative paradigm, holding the potential to revolutionize the design and operation of wireless communication systems.

Wireless Metaverse requires a paradigm shift from current AI-empowered wireless networks towards AI-native wireless networks that embed contextual information from a Metaverse environment into minimal yet expressive representations. Moreover, signal processing, transmission protocols, and network architecture, including physical (PHY) layer processing, medium access control (MAC), and air–interface in general should be redesigned carefully, or even cross-layer interacted to build a pathway to semantic communications. Under a specific QoE evaluation, how to combine semantic information extracted from raw data with network and channel conditions may need to be investigated according to different applications. In particular, multimedia content (e.g., 2D/3D image, video, haptic, holographic) requiring ultra-high throughput and low latency is expected to dominate the mobile data traffic in the wireless Metaverse, which could be studied as a typical Real-Time Broadband Communication (RTBC) application.

This Special Issue aims to bring together the leading researchers in the field, both from academia and industry, to exchange their views on Semantic Communications towards the Wireless Metaverse. Semantic communication represents a cutting-edge research direction in the field of current communication networks. This technology is poised to revolutionize the electronic information industry and holds significant practical implications.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Cross-layer interaction/optimization for wireless networks
• Quality of experience (QoE) evaluation
• Network architectures and protocols for semantic communications
• Semantics-aware sampling and transmission policy
• Joint semantic/feature and channel coding
• End-to-end communications
• Knowledge-driven semantic language and representation
• Intelligent transceiver in wireless Metaverse
• Data-driven optimization and applications to wireless network design
• Data and model privacy in AI/ML solutions for wireless systems
• Data mining and analytics over wireless networks
• AI-based security and privacy-preserving mechanisms for IoT networks.
• Data management platform, testbeds and experiments for network optimization
• Network Function Integration with blockchain approach
• Trustworthy technology for next generation wireless networks
• XR-enabled immersive communication for Metaverse
• Deep learning-based image/video compression and coding for semantic communication
• Semantic-aware real-time processing of holographic and haptic content
• AI-driven adaptive bitrate and quality control for Metaverse video applications
• Federated learning and edge AI for distributed semantic extraction in XR environments
• Wireless Network for hyper-reliable communications
• 3D image feature extraction for semantic metaverse object resurrection and reconstruction

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Weichao Chen
Dr. Hao Xu
Dr. Huihui Wu
Guest Editors

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