Edge Intelligence Empowered Metaverse: Architecture, Technologies, and Open Issues

Recently, the metaverse has emerged as a focal point of widespread interest, capturing attention across various domains. However, the construction of a pluralistic, realistic, and shared digital world is still in its infancy. Due to the ultra-strict requirements in security, intelligence, and real-time, it is urgent to solve the technical challenges existed in building metaverse ecosystems, such as ensuring the provision of seamless communication and reliable computing services in the face of a dynamic and time-varying complex network environment. In terms of digital infrastructure, edge computing (EC), as a distributed computing paradigm, has the potential to guarantee computing power, bandwidth, and storage. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence (AI) is regarded as a powerful tool to provide technical support for automated and efficient decision-making for metaverse devices. In this context, this paper focuses on integrating EC and AI to facilitate the development of the metaverse, namely, the edge intelligence-empowered metaverse. Specifically, we first outline the metaverse architecture and driving technologies and discuss EC as a key component of the digital infrastructure for metaverse realization. Then, we elaborate on two mainstream classifications of edge intelligence in metaverse scenarios, including AI for edge and AI on edge. Finally, we identify some open issues.