Dual-Level Resource Provisioning and Heterogeneous Auction for Mobile Metaverse

Abstract

The development of the mobile Metaverse has garnered increasing attention in the next-generation Internet, fueled by the rapid advancements of mobile Internet, communication, and computing technologies. With the resource limitations faced by mobile Metaverse users (MUs), the mobile Metaverse market is flourishing. This market enables MUs to access high-quality immersive experiences by trading resources with Metaverse service providers (MSPs) across geographically distributed resource pools. However, the mobile Metaverse market still faces several challenges, including the hierarchical mobile Metaverse service structure, temporal dependencies, and heterogeneous incentive mechanisms. To address these problems, this paper proposes a dual-level resources trading approach for mobile Metaverse based on blockchain. This approach employs a dual-level structure consisting of resource provisioning and heterogeneous auction mechanisms. Specifically, we formulate the resource provisioning as a temporal-dependent average delay minimization problem at the low level. To solve this low-level problem, we introduce a novel algorithm called LyDif, which leverages Lyapunov optimization techniques and diffusion models. At the high level, we propose a price-guided double dutch auction (PG-DDA) mechanism to match heterogeneous resources and determine pricing strategies. The PG-DDA smart contract is deployed on a consortium blockchain platform, facilitating resource trading management and transaction monitoring. Based on a real trace of edge-cloud service requests, our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme in achieving optimal latency and social welfare.