Mobile networks face harsh reality of delivering the metaverse

The metaverse may not seem like a pressing concern for operators and the telecom industry just yet. Only a handful of consumers are able and willing to use it, and it may be a long time before most people are peering at the world from behind computer-generated images of their own eyes. But it is becoming increasingly likely that our future will include some type of augmented or virtual reality (AR or VR), begging questions about how it will interact with networks.

This is precisely the topic a virtual panel assembled by Keysight Technologies sought to explore. While the metaverse holds the potential to transform industrial settings, there is concern that today's networks will be unable to handle the increased demand for throughput and low latency it will generate.

Devaki Chandramouli, a Bell Labs Fellow and head of North American standardization at Nokia, said a future user is likely to expect at least a 2K resolution, with 8K required for a highly immersive experience.

Additionally, a powerful extended reality (XR) device might not be able to handle the processing needed due to battery and heat constraints. That would require some processing to happen more remotely, driving up the requirements for low latency, split rendering and edge computing.

XR devices may well be tethered to smartphones to handle some of processing, said Sarah LaSelva, the director of 6G marketing at Keysight. This, she argued, will constitute a change to the existing ecosystem.

While Chandramouli believes 5G can deliver a lot of the capacity and coverage needed for XR, LaSelva disagrees, saying requirements will probably not be met until 6G kicks in. Chandramouli, however, responded by saying that 5G Advanced, a later version of the standard, will address many of 5G's shortcomings.

She went on to say that the 3GPP, the umbrella group for mobile standards, will introduce technologies to mitigate congestion at different layers, such as radio, transport and the core, and also work on closer integration of network technologies and applications to boost latency.

With 6G, there may be the opportunity to make sure issues are addressed from day one. "We believe 6G will need spectrum in the so-called golden band – 7 to 15GHz – and this will offer 400MHz bandwidth on a per-operator basis and it will also improve the capacity by 20%, reusing the same cell site," Chandramouli said.

The 7GHz to 15GHz spectrum band, known as centimeter wave spectrum, is increasingly being touted as the optimal resource for 6G. The issue, however, is that signals in this band do not travel as far as they do in the lower bands used today. To utilize this spectrum effectively, antenna design will need to be optimized, said Chandramouli.

"Seamlessness" is another big issue. As LaSelva pointed out, today's users experience a drop in connection when moving from one network to another – from Wi-Fi to 5G, for example. With the metaverse, this may have a bigger impact on user experience than it does now. Satellite could be a solution for ubiquitous coverage, said LaSelva. But deployments are still in the early stages, noted Chandramouli.

5G conundrum

There is no clear consensus on what type of network is, or will be, best suited to transport us to the metaverse, and whether 5G is up to the challenge. In fact, Meta itself has argued both yes and no in the recent past. An April post by the company claims no additional investment will be needed to make the metaverse work on 5G, with no network constraints expected to occur due to AR.

But those claims were part of Meta's pushback against the notion of "fair share." European telcos in favor of that want the Internet companies held responsible for most data traffic to shoulder some of the costs of maintaining and upgrading networks.

The post came a year after a different Meta text discussed the metaverse's network requirements, which included many of the areas where 5G has historically struggled.

One of the big issues is (or at least used to be) upload speed. In the 2022 text, Meta specifically argued that the metaverse would require symmetrical broadband speeds for upload and download, which would be a departure from the current situation, where most of 5G's limited capacity is dedicated to download connections.

And other, more general, issues with 5G could also stand in the way of a smooth metaverse experience. Despite capacity improvements and other advances, inefficiencies carried over from previous generations – 4G and earlier – are hindering performance, according to Muriel Médard, NEC professor of software science and engineering at MIT.

"It's like you put on make-up and then you just kept putting another layer on and on and you never removed it," she said, pointing to what she called legacy "sedimentary layers."

"When I send you information, I change it so that you might be able to recognize it even though it's noisy and it's been corrupted. And right now, we are doing this with these really long codes that add extra delay and we also scramble the information, which adds extra delay," she added, noting that this adds to cost and energy use.

With more data traffic, keeping the networks secure will also be a challenge, given that traditional cryptographic techniques are already under threat from quantum computing, as Médard acknowledged.

Chandramouli added that plain data will need to be encrypted either end to end or within the network itself. This would require XR devices to provide the necessary support.

This echoes another point raised by the panelists – while a lot can be gauged about the metaverse's impact on networks, the exact challenges and requirements will ultimately depend on what devices will be used to access it.

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— Tereza Krásová, Associate Editor, Light Reading