Optimizing Mixed Capacity of Extended Reality and Mobile Broadband Services in 5G-Advanced Networks

Extended reality (XR) is an emerging technology that has gained significant attention in the context of fifth-generation (5G) and 5G-Advanced cellular networks and beyond. One of the less explored areas for practical XR service deployments is the study of its interaction with the existing traffic such as enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB). This study explores the performance of having both XR and eMBB users simultaneously in a multi-cell network for two different indoor and outdoor deployment scenarios. We show that the main limitation to maximizing XR capacity in the mixed scenario is inter-cell interference (ICI) generated by eMBB users. ICI from eMBB results in a loss of about 80% in XR capacity when an XR source data rate of 45 Mbps and a strict packet delay budget (PDB) of 10 ms is enforced. To mitigate this, we propose new radio resource management enhancements that apply restrictions on eMBB radio resource usage to balance between eMBB and XR simultaneous capacity. With the proposed enhancements, maximum XR capacity can be maintained for the case with an XR source data rate of 45 Mbps and a PDB of 20 ms while restricting eMBB throughput by about 50%. The impact on eMBB throughput performance from adding XR users depends on the XR PDB, deployment environment, and the eMBB radio resource usage restriction. The results demonstrate that the eMBB throughput declines with a factor of 1 to 4 of the XR sum rate.