Reliable Coded Distributed Computing for Metaverse Services: Coalition Formation and Incentive Mechanism Design

The metaverse is regarded as a new wave of technological transformation that provides a virtual space for people to interact with each other through digital avatars. To achieve immersive user experiences in the metaverse, real-time rendering is the key technology. However, computing intensive tasks of real-time graphic and audio rendering from metaverse service providers cannot be processed efficiently on a single resource-limited mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) device. Alternatively, such devices can adopt the collaborative computing paradigm based on Coded Distributed Computing (CDC) to support metaverse services. Therefore, this paper introduces a reliable collaborative CDC framework for metaverse. In the framework, idle resources from mobile devices, acting as CDC workers, are aggregated to handle intensive computation tasks in the metaverse. A coalition can be formed among reliable workers based on a reputation metric which is maintained in a double blockchains database. The framework also considers an incentive to attract reliable workers to participate and process computation tasks of metaverse services. Moreover, the framework is designed with a hierarchical structure composed of coalition formation and Stackelberg games in the lower and upper levels to determine stable coalitions and rewards for reliable workers, respectively. The simulation results illustrate that the proposed framework is resistant to malicious workers. Compared with the random worker selection scheme, the proposed coalition formation and Stackelberg game can improve the utilities of both metaverse service providers and CDC workers.