MuMeNet: A Network Simulator for Musical Metaverse Communications

TL;DR

The paper addresses the challenge of provisioning time-critical, multimodal MM sessions over 5G/6G networks. It introduces MuMeNet, a discrete-event simulator that combines a dynamic, information-aware service-graph layer with a cloud-network graph to model MM traffic, replication, and cross-stream synchronization. A CNFlow-based MILP is developed for joint placement and routing of MM services, evaluated on synthetic topologies to reveal trade-offs between minimum cost and load balancing under multicast and latency constraints. The work provides a practical, extensible framework for reproducible MM networking research and informs orchestration strategies for ultra-low-latency, multisensory performances at scale.

Abstract

The Metaverse, a shared and spatially organized digital continuum, is transforming various industries, with music emerging as a leading use case. Live concerts, collaborative composition, and interactive experiences are driving the Musical Metaverse (MM), but the requirements of the underlying network and service infrastructures hinder its growth. These challenges underscore the need for a novel modeling and simulation paradigm tailored to the unique characteristics of MM sessions, along with specialized service provisioning strategies capable of capturing their interactive, heterogeneous, and multicast-oriented nature. To this end, we make a first attempt to formally model and analyze the problem of service provisioning for MM sessions in 5G/6G networks. We first formalize service and network graph models for the MM, using "live audience interaction in a virtual concert" as a reference scenario. We then present MuMeNet, a novel discrete-event network simulator specifically tailored to the requirements and the traffic dynamics of the MM. We showcase the effectiveness of MuMeNet by running a linear programming based orchestration policy on the reference scenario and providing performance analysis under realistic MM workloads.

Figures (9)

• Figure 1: Graph representation of the modeled components and their connections of the reference SG given two users.
• Figure 2: Augmented cloud-network graph. Gray edges represent network links indicating the availability of communication resources for transmitting information between nodes, yellow for producing data (source), red for consuming data (destination), blue and black are computation links representing producing and consuming capabilities, respectively.
• Figure 3: Example of a SG, where edges represent data streams (commodities) and vertices service functions.
• Figure 4: MuMetNet Design Architecture: The top part shows the Core Layer responsible for general orchestration and management, while the bottom part shows Scenarios Workspace where event-driven experiments are performed.
• Figure 5: Core Engine Architecture of MuMeNet.