Coalition of 6G and Blockchain in AR/VR Space: Challenges and Future Directions

Abstract

The digital content wave has proliferated the financial and industrial sectors. Moreover, with the rise of massive internet-of-things, and automation, technologies like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have emerged as prominent players to drive a range of applications. Currently, sixth-generation (6G) networks support enhanced holographic projection through terahertz (THz) bandwidths, ultra-low latency, and massive device connectivity. However, the data is exchanged between autonomous networks over untrusted channels. Thus, to ensure data security, privacy, and trust among stakeholders, blockchain (BC) opens new dimensions towards intelligent resource management, user access control, audibility, and chronology in stored transactions. Thus, the BC and 6G coalition in future AR/VR applications is an emerging investigative topic. To date, authors have proposed surveys that study the integration of BC and 6G in AR/VR in isolation, and hence a coherent survey is required. Thus, to address the gap, the survey is the first-of-its-kind to investigate and study the coalition of BC and 6G in AR/VR space. Based on the proposed research questions in the survey, a solution taxonomy is presented, and different verticals are studied in detail. Furthermore, an integrative architecture is proposed, and open issues and challenges are presented. Finally, a case study, BvTours, is presented that presents a unique survey on BC-based 6G-assisted AR/VR virtual home tour service. The survey intends to propose future resilient frameworks and architectures for different industry 4.0 verticals and would serve as starting directions for academia, industry stakeholders, and research organizations to study the coalition of BC and 6G in AR/VR in industrial applications, gaming, digital content manufacturing, and digital assets protection in greater detail.