Semantic-Aware Sensing Information Transmission for Metaverse: A Contest Theoretic Approach

With the advancement of network and computer technologies, virtual cyberspace keeps evolving, and Metaverse is the main representative. As an irreplaceable technology that supports Metaverse, the sensing information transmission from the physical world to Metaverse is vital. Inspired by emerging semantic communication, in this paper, we propose a semantic transmission framework for transmitting sensing information from the physical world to Metaverse. Leveraging the in-depth understanding of sensing information, we define the semantic bases, through which the semantic encoding of sensing data is achieved for the first time. Consequently, the amount of sensing data that needs to be transmitted is dramatically reduced. Unlike conventional methods that undergo data degradation and require data recovery, our approach achieves the sensing goal without data recovery while maintaining performance. To further improve Metaverse service quality, we introduce contest theory to create an incentive mechanism that motivates users to upload data more frequently. Experimental results show that the average data amount after semantic encoding is reduced to about 27.87% of that before encoding, while ensuring the sensing performance. Additionally, the proposed contest theoretic based incentive mechanism increases the sum of data uploading frequency by 27.47% compared to the uniform award scheme.