The recent advancements in immersive technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are paving the way for the realization of a surreal world namely “Metaverse”; a term that was recently re-coined by Meta—formerly known as Facebook. Metaverse aims at transforming the digital experiences by blending the physical and digital worlds creating theoretically unlimited virtual environments for users to experience heterogenous activities in real-time.

Technically, to create virtual environments, the Metaverse, in addition to computer vision and image processing techniques, also relies on pervasive network access and proximate computations. The goal is to deliver a seamless and real-time experience to geographically distributed users to interact with each other to the extent they are co-located and physically situated in completely different and distant worlds. However, traditional networking solutions and edge computing techniques cannot deliver the real-time experience in Metaverse owing to considerable latency incurred by the inefficient network protocol design and little edge computing capabilities. These issues thus cause a lag in rendering virtual objects on the intended position, especially in multi-person collaborative Metaverse applications.

This workshop aims at presenting and showcasing the latest advances in networking for instance the emergence of New-IP/future vertical communication networks (FVCN) in conjunction with information-centric networking (ICN), and edge and fog computing integration to enable distributed proximate computations offloading to resolve the Metaverse challenges presented above.

Topics of Interest:

We seek original completed and unpublished work not currently under review by any other journal/ magazine/conference. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Collaborative content-sharing network protocols for Metaverse
• Metaverse-based customized network protocol design
• Proximate computation offloading techniques for Metaverse
• Latency reduction techniques for Metaverse applications
• Integration of edge and fog computing for Metaverse
• Information-centric Metaverse
• New IP / future vertical communication networks for Metaverse
• Protocol design for distributed edge and fog computing for Metaverse
• Microservices architectural requirements & design implementation for Metaverse
• Resource orchestration in Metaverse
• Distributed resource allocation in Metaverse
• Intelligent networking for Metaverse
• Distributed microservices deployment models for the heterogeneous compute nodes in Metavers
• Secure and reliable communications for Metaverse

Important Dates:

Workshop paper submission deadline: 20 January 2023
Workshop paper decision date: 06 March 2023
Camera-ready due: 15 April 202


General Co-Chairs:

• Muhammad Atif Ur Rehman (m.atif.ur.rehman@mmu.ac.uk ), Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, United Kingdom

• Pietro Manzoni (pmanzoni@disca.upv.es ), Universitat Politècnica de València Camino de Vera, Valencia, Spain

• Spyridon Mastorakis (smastorakis@unomaha.edu ), University of Nebraska at Omaha, United State


TPC Co-Chairs

• Waqas Khalid, Korea University, Sejong City, South Korea

• Susmit Shannigrahi, Tennessee Tech, USA

• Rehmat Ullah, Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK

• Ali Kashif Bashir, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK


Publicity Co-Chairs

• Inam Ullah Khan, King's College London, UK

• Muhammad Salahuddin, Hongik University, South Korea

• Md Washik Al Azad, University of Nebraska at Omaha, US