Application Awareness for Extended Reality Services: 5G-Advanced and Beyond

Extended reality (XR) services form the basis of the metaverse, a fully immersive experience where users can interact with each other and digital objects in a three-dimensional real or imagined digital space. Past and ongoing standardization activities focus on enabling cellular networks to effectively support XR to ensure that the metaverse can be enabled everywhere. One enabling feature is application awareness (AA) within the service provisioning framework of 5G-Advanced. AA is extending the current quality of service (QoS) model to support a finer QoS granularity and add more detailed application information to improve radio resource management and eventually enhance users' immersive experience. Current and future AA innovations will enable cellular networks to improve system capacity and further optimize service provisioning to fit specific application needs. In this article, we present a comprehensive overview of AA for XR services in cellular networks and future research directions in that area.