Trustworthy Semantic Communications for the Metaverse Relying on Federated Learning

As an evolving successor to the mobile Internet, the Metaverse creates the impression of an immersive environment, integrating the virtual and real world. In contrast to the traditional mobile Internet based on servers, the Metaverse is constructed by billions of cooperating users by harnessing their smart edge devices and having limited communication and computation resources. In this immersive environment, an unprecedented amount of multi-modal data has to be processed. To circumvent this impending bottleneck, low-rate semantic communication might be harnessed in support of the Metaverse. However, given that private multi-modal data is exchanged in the Metaverse, we have to guard against security breaches and privacy invasions. Hence, we conceive a trust-worthy semantic communication system for the Metaverse based on a federated learning architecture by exploiting its distributed decision-making and privacy-preserving capability. We conclude by identifying a suite of promising research directions and open issues.