Collaborative and Verifiable VNF Management for Metaverse With Efficient Modular Designs.

The metaverse is envisioned to create immersive and virtual worlds for people to experience interoperable 3D applications. However, the real-time, interactive, and multimedia characteristics of the metaverse applications require strict quality-of-service (QoS) on the underlying networking architecture, including high throughput, ultra-low delay, and human-centric service configurations. Network function virtualization (NFV)-enabled networking resource management can provide a promising solution to service-oriented QoS satisfaction for metaverse users. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based collaborative and verifiable virtualized network function (VNF) management scheme for metaverse, named BVNF+. BVNF+ enables multiple network providers across different trust domains to abstract their services as VNFs and collaboratively manage end-to-end network slices for human-centric network services in metaverse. To address the design challenge of balancing the on-chain and off-chain overheads, we decouple the computations of VNF queries into modular components based on software and hardware verifiable computation (vc) approaches. Our modular strategy can achieve on/off-chain computation and communication efficiency while keeping low usage of the secure hardware. We conduct security analysis and extensive experiments based on a real-world blockchain testing network. The analysis and experimental results demonstrate that BVNF+ is both secure and efficient as compared with the existing works.