Guest Editorial: Multi-Access Networking for Extended Reality and Metaverse

With the advent of multimedia content, sensing, imaging technologies, compute capabilities, and networking and Cloud solutions, the XReality (XR) technologies and solutions are continuously evolving. XR is used as an umbrella term to describe Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR). Recent advances in XR and immersive technologies pave the way to the paradigm of the metaverse. The metaverse is considered the next evolution of the Internet and IoT. Users can traverse a virtual world that mimics aspects of the physical world, to provide varying immersive experiences. In this context, immersive experience refers to developing a seamless and wirelessly connected extended reality between virtual and real worlds to the users. Indeed, the metaverse has received much attention across several industry segments. Recent technologies in human-computer interaction, IoT, Cloud and Edge Computing, Blockchain, NFT, and high-performance computing infrastructures have enabled many new application scenarios for the XR and metaverse. For instance, IoT is helping to map data from real life, in real-time, into a digital reality. Thus, IoT's primary role will be to bring the outside world into the digital realm. In addition, multi-Access networking, the envisioned future of 6G technologies, and artificial intelligence could support such massive and immersive virtual environments by connecting billions of users and creating a shared world where virtual and reality merge. However, limited by resources, computing power, and sensory devices, metaverse is still far from realizing its entire vision of immersion, materialization, and interoperability. In addition, achieving these objectives requires synergistic techniques from different fields, including deep learning, optimization, game theory, wireless communications, and graph/network theory. There is also a need for considerable synergy between the device, the network infrastructure, and the applications across multiple players to enable end-to-end solutions.