Toward Supporting Holographic Services Over Deterministic 6G Integrated Terrestrial and Non-Terrestrial Networks

Driven by the emerging mission-critical applications, the need for the deterministic networking (DetNet) capabilities of the current network infrastructure is becoming increasingly important, and that is to enable assured bandwidth, latency/jitter and reliability for these services. Recently, the technological advancements of non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) present great opportunities to provide such deterministic service provisioning for time-sensitive traffic, especially when integrated into terrestrial networks (TNs), which can be referred to as 6G-integrated terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks (6G-ITNTN). This article introduces the envisioned DetNet-enabled NTN architecture and explains the interplay of the bandwidth potential, computational power, and latency features of different NTN architecture options. Then, after analyzing the network performance requirements in terms of bandwidth, latency, and synchronization of remote holographic applications, we shed light on the NTN-based deterministic communication scenarios to support holographic services. Third, we discuss the deterministic network selection and routing (DNSR) scheme and propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based DNSR approach as a further step to control the end-to-end (E2E) delays for joint holographic flows in a deterministic way. Finally, we present a simulation to evaluate the performance of the proposed method of supporting critical holographic service flows over NTNs.