A Survey on Enabling XR Services in Beyond 5G Mobile Networks

Extended reality (XR) would become the main enabler of future immersive experience services. The challenge today is how to make this new set of immersive experience services running through a mobile network such as beyond 5G efficiently in terms of latency and Quality of experience (QoE). Academics and industry have already started to study and provide solutions towards enabling XR services in beyond 5G networks. These solutions affect both the network and the service elements by either introducing new ones or modifying existing ones. In the present paper, we proffer an extensive survey in this topic with details on the solutions proposed by academia per part of the network, i.e. radio access, core, edge etc. Moreover, we provide a thorough overview of 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standards in Releases 17 and 18 focusing on the proposed solutions, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), services and network elements. Finally, we summarize the lessons gained from this survey and draw the attention regarding open affairs for further research exploration for enabling XR services in beyond 5G networks and towards 6G.