Metaverse meets ICN: Low-Latency, Synchronous Communications for XR/AR Applications

The evolution of metaverse applications, such as extended reality (XR), telerobotics, and digital twins, requires high bandwidth, low latency, and stable jitter, particularly for real-time video delivery. Although WebRTC-based solutions have been widely used, they face limitations due to high latency and traffic concentration at clouds. These constraints make them less suitable for large-scale metaverse contexts. Information-centric networking (ICN) offers potential solutions by enabling efficient multicasting, in-network caching for low-latency loss recovery, and multipath routing for enhanced communication robustness. In this paper, we introduce a MetaICN framework that enables XR applications to collaborate with the ICN. We designed and implemented an XR application on top of MetaICN that supports interactive teleoperation with real-time and high-quality (e.g. 4K/60fps) video streaming. Comparative evaluations between the WebRTC-based approach and MetaICN demonstrate that the proposed MetaICN provides significant advantages for synchronous communications through its multicast-based communications.