Event-based communication improves immersive 6g experience and efficiency
Event-Native Immersive Communication for 6G: From Multimodal Streams to Event Beliefs
Information Theory
Summary
Sending all raw sensory data for virtual experiences in future 6G networks uses too much wireless power and bandwidth. The authors suggest focusing on the key events happening in the physical world instead, and communicating beliefs about these events. This approach better captures what really matters for users’ experience and reduces the needed signal strength compared to traditional error-focused methods. Their simulations show this event-based method cuts communication errors and power requirements significantly.
What this means in practice
- •For wireless network engineers: Design communication systems that prioritize transmitting event beliefs over raw sensor data to reduce power usage and improve immersive experience quality in 6G networks.
- •For virtual reality platform developers: Implement event-based data representation to enhance remote presence and interaction by focusing delivery on meaningful physical events rather than full sensory streams.
Authors
Yiyang Zhu, Li Wei, Chau Yuen
Abstract
The development of multimodal sensing capabilities is crucial for realizing immersive communications and enabling rich, natural remote interactions in future sixth-generation~(6G) communications. However, transmitting high-dimensional sensory streams places substantial pressure on wireless resources and leaves a fundamental question unresolved: what information about the underlying physical process should be preserved across wireless delivery? To address this issue, we establish an event-native immersive-communication framework in which a service-relevant physical event defines the communication object, while event beliefs represent the information available to transceiver agents before and after wireless delivery. Based on this event-native framework, we further propose event-belief deficiency (EBD) to evaluate quality of experience (QoE) in immersive communications, which differs from the conventional normalized mean-squared error (NMSE), as NMSE can be insensitive to physically distinct procedures whose stream distortions lie in a similar range. For Gaussian event beliefs with mode-separable delivery over Rayleigh fading, we derive the log-det EBD, its induced received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) threshold, the exact outage probability, and the required transmit SNR. Simulation results with a physics-driven source show that stream NMSE can remain nearly unchanged across physically distinct event procedures, whereas log-det EBD reliably reflects their event-level uncertainty. Relative to a mean-squared-error (MSE)-oriented interface, event-native delivery reduces normalized log-det EBD by up to $63.6\%$ and lowers the required average received SNR by $3.47$~dB under the evaluated outage constraint, substantiating the effectiveness of the proposed framework.