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

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the performance impact of integrating XR and best effort eMBB traffic in 5G-Advanced networks, showing minimal capacity loss for XR services and analyzing capacity dependencies on rate and latency.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of XR and eMBB traffic coexistence in 5G-Advanced, including capacity estimations and the effects of network load and interference.

Findings

Adding XR at 45 Mbps causes minimal eMBB capacity loss.

XR capacity depends on rate and latency budget.

Full load and interference significantly reduce XR service capacity.

Abstract

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 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 number of supported XR users depends significantly on the rate but also the latency budget. We show also 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.