Goal-oriented Semantic Communication for the Metaverse Application

With the emergence of the metaverse and its role in enabling real-time simulation and analysis of real-world counterparts, an increasing number of personalized metaverse scenarios are being created to influence entertainment experiences and social behaviors. However, compared to traditional image and video entertainment applications, the exact transmission of the vast amount of metaverse-associated information significantly challenges the capacity of existing bit-oriented communication networks. Moreover, the current metaverse also witnesses a growing goal shift for transmitting the meaning behind custom-designed content, such as user-designed buildings and avatars, rather than exact copies of physical objects. To meet this growing goal shift and bandwidth challenge, this paper proposes a goal-oriented semantic communication framework for metaverse application (GSCM) to explore and define semantic information through the goal levels. Specifically, we first analyze the traditional image communication framework in metaverse construction and then detail our proposed semantic information along with the end-to-end wireless communication. We then describe the designed modules of the GSCM framework, including goal-oriented semantic information extraction, base knowledge definition, and neural radiance field (NeRF) based metaverse construction. Finally, numerous experiments have been conducted to demonstrate that, compared to image communication, our proposed GSCM framework decreases transmission latency by up to 92.6% and enhances the virtual object operation accuracy and metaverse construction clearance by up to 45.6% and 44.7%, respectively.