Guest Editorial:Special issue on media convergence and intelligent technology in the metaverse

The metaverse is a new type of Internet application and social form that integrates a variety of new technologies,including artificial intelligence,digital twins,block chain,cloud computing,virtual reality,robots,with brain-computer interfaces,and 5G.Media convergence technology is a systematic and comprehensive discipline that applies the theories and methods of modern science and technology to the development of media innovation,mainly including multimedia creation,production,communication,service,consumption,reproduction and so on.The emergence of new technologies,such as deep learning,distributed computing,and extended reality has promoted the development of media integration in the metaverse,and these technologies are the key factors that promote the current transformation of the Internet to the metaverse.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface:design the channel-a new opportunity for future wireless networks

In this paper,we survey state-of-the-art research outcomes in the burgeoning field of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface(RIS),given its potential for significant performance enhancement of next-generation wireless communication networks by means of adapting a propagation environment.Emphasis has been placed on several aspects gating the commercial viability of future network deployment.Comprehensive summaries are provided for practical hardware design considerations and broad implications of artificial intelligence techniques,as are in-depth outlooks on the salient aspects of system models,use cases,and physical layer optimization techniques.

Optimal chunk caching in network coding-based qualitative communication

Network processing in the current Internet is at the entirety of the data packet,which is problematic when encountering network congestion.The newly proposed Internet service named Qualitative Communication changes the network processing paradigm to an even finer granularity,namely chunk level,which obsoletes many existing networking policies and schemes,especially the caching algorithms and cache replacement policies that have been extensively explored in Web Caching,Content Delivery Networks(CDN)or Information-Centric Networks(ICN).This paper outlines all the new factors that are brought by random linear network coding-based Qualitative Communication and proves the importance and necessity of considering them.A novel metric is proposed by taking these new factors into consideration.An optimization problem is formulated to maximize the metric value of all retained chunks in the local storage of network nodes under the constraint of storage limit.A cache replacement scheme that obtains the optimal result in a recursive manner is proposed correspondingly.With the help of the introduced intelligent cache replacement algorithm,the performance evaluations show remarkably reduced end-to-end latency compared to the existing schemes in various network scenarios.

Ultra-broadband access enabled by fiber optics(Invited Paper)

The advent of low loss optical fiber has consistently led us to the ultra-broadband era, where bandwidths exceeding 1 Gb/s are commonplace. This Review reviews the early history of fiber access, pointing out some of the lasting design choices and signature features of fiber access. The progress of the various passive optical network technologies is also reviewed, and some views regarding the future trends of fiber in the access.