Performance of Joint XR and Best-Effort eMBB Traffic in 5G-Advanced Networks

In this paper, we address the joint performance of eXtended reality (XR) and best-effort enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) traffic for a 5G-Advanced system. Although XR users require stringent throughput and latency performance, operators do not lose significant additional network capacity when adding XR users to an eMBB-dominated network. For instance, adding an XR service at 45 Mbps with a 10 ms packet delay budget yields close to a 45 Mbps drop in eMBB capacity. In an XR-only network layer, we show how the capacity in a number of supported XR users depends significantly on the rate but also the latency budget. We also show how the XR service capacity is significantly reduced in the mixed service setting as the system goes into full load and other-cell interference becomes significant. The presented results can be used by cellular service providers to assess their networks’ performance of XR traffic based on their current eMBB performance or as input to dimensioning to be able to serve certain XR traffic loads.