Economics of Semantic Communication in Metaverse: An Auction Approach

Metaverse provides embodied artificial-reality experience to the users in the virtual spaces. Many innovative and creative services such as virtual conference and tourism have been realized in the digital twins maintained by the virtual service providers (VSP) in Metaverse. Digital twins are digital copies of the physical world constructed virtually by the VSPs using real-world data. For a realistic experience, VSPs need to collect data that is up-to-date and relevant to their services. In this paper, we propose an incentive design framework to support the data trading between VSPs and edge devices. In the auction model, we model the valuation of data by considering data relatedness and data freshness. In our model, the semantic communication model is used to filter the relevant data, and the age of information (AoI) metric is used to assess the data freshness. Results show that by considering the data freshness, our mechanism helps to increase the average update frequency so that the VSPs obtain fresh data for construction of digital twins. Our model ensures the desired properties of individual rationality, incentive compatibility, and budget balance.