Understanding the Metaverse from a Network Perspective: Concepts, Technical Implications, and Emerging Challenges

Recently the term “metaverse” has become popular, and like many buzzwords it originated from commercial initiatives; however, its lasting impact depends on solid technical foundations that can drive industry upgrades. The author adopts a network‑centric view to interpret the metaverse and assess its implications for networking technology.

1. Concept and technical connotation from the perspective of network access terminals – The author aligns with Alibaba’s definition that the metaverse is the internet built on VR/AR glasses. Internet infrastructure consists of three layers: terminal access, autonomous networking, and heterogeneous inter‑networking. Terminal access evolves from PCs to smartphones and now to VR/AR glasses, which introduce three‑dimensional display and interaction, representing the next milestone for “communication‑type” terminals.

The author further classifies terminals into communication‑type, computing‑type, and functional‑type, noting that functional terminals (e.g., smart cars, industrial IoT) add new networking demands such as vehicular networking and industrial internet.

2. New network requirements introduced by the metaverse – The metaverse raises higher expectations for scalability, bandwidth, latency, security, and manageability. Communication‑type terminals need end‑to‑end latency below 10 ms for immersive VR/AR experiences, far stricter than the tens‑to‑hundreds of milliseconds sufficient for PC or mobile use. Computing‑type terminals demand multi‑gigabit bandwidth and microsecond latency, while functional terminals require deterministic latency and combined information‑function safety.

To meet these demands, the internet evolves existing protocols (e.g., TCP → RDMA/ RoCE, DETNET for deterministic networking) and explores new transport and routing innovations.

3. Specific challenges

Challenge 1 – Trust and security: The metaverse’s “virtual‑physical fusion” requires trustworthy end‑to‑end communication, conflicting with the internet’s open, distributed architecture. Solutions may involve distributed trust mechanisms and stronger identity/traceability frameworks.

Challenge 2 – Ultra‑low latency: Achieving sub‑10 ms interaction conflicts with the internet’s design of open traffic, store‑and‑forward routing, and protocol overhead. Potential mitigations include advanced traffic engineering, optimized packet forwarding, protocol redesign, and edge computing to reduce physical propagation delay.

Challenge 3 – Deterministic QoS: Providing guaranteed service quality clashes with the internet’s statistical multiplexing and fairness principles. While mechanisms like QUIC and DETNET offer deterministic performance for high‑priority flows, allocating priority fairly among diverse communication, computing, and functional terminals remains an open problem.

Conclusion – From a networking standpoint, the metaverse represents a major upgrade of internet applications driven by three‑dimensional terminals, similar to the shift from classic to mobile internet. Meeting its heightened security, latency, and determinism requirements will be a key driver for future network research and development; failure to do so may relegate the metaverse to a fleeting hype.