Pouria Paymard’s research while affiliated with Nokia and other places

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.

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of fifth-generation (5G)-Advanced system-level performance, focusing on the coexistence of extended reality (XR) and enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) traffic in the uplink direction of transmission. Two deployment scenarios of dense urban and indoor hotspot are considered. The study investigates the influence of uplink power control (UPC) parameters on the XR capacity and proposes strategies to manage eMBB inter-cell interference through traffic-specific UPC settings. By jointly optimizing UPC parameters for each traffic type, this research aims to minimize the eMBB throughput degradation while safeguarding the XR capacity. The findings reveal the impact of deployment scenarios on XR and eMBB capacity, and the trade-offs involved in the UPC optimization. These findings also offer valuable guidance to cellular operators for optimizing network configurations to accommodate emerging XR traffic alongside existing services.

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.

One of the rapidly emerging services for fifth-generation (5 G)-Advanced is eXtended Reality (XR), which combines several immersive experiences and cloud gaming services. Those services are demanding as they call for relatively high data rates under tight latency constraints, sometimes also referred to as dependable real-time applications. Supporting many XR users per cell requires highly efficient radio solutions. We utilize code block group (CBG)-based transmissions to enhance the XR performance, via smarter link adaptation and to reduce the retransmission overhead. We propose an enhanced channel quality indicator (CQI) that allows controlling the number of failed CBGs per transport block (TB) to its near-optimal value, as compared to using legacy CQI schemes that correspond to 10% TB error rates. We present both an analytical analysis of the related problems and solutions, as well as an extensive dynamic system-level performance assessment, to document the performance benefits of our proposals. Our results show an increased XR system capacity of 17% to 33% as compared to what can be supported by current 5 G systems with baseline CQI schemes. We also present enhanced CQI complexity-reducing techniques based on derived closed-form expressions that are attractive to the user equipment implementation.

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 newradio 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.

One of the rapidly emerging services for fifth-generation (5G)-Advanced is eXtended Reality (XR) which combines several immersive experiences and cloud gaming services. Those services are demanding as they call for relatively high data rates under tight latency constraints, sometimes also referred to as dependable real-time applications. Supporting as many XR users per cell requires highly efficient radio solutions. In this paper, we propose an enhanced channel quality indicator (CQI) that results in a better link adaptation to unleash the full performance potential of code block group (CBG) based transmissions for XR cases. We present both an analytical analysis of the related problems and solutions, as well as an extensive dynamic system-level performance assessment in line with the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP)-defined advanced simulation methodologies. Our results show an increased XR system capacity of 17% to 33% as compared to what can be supported by current 5G systems with baseline CQI schemes. We also present enhanced CQI complexity-reducing techniques based on derived closed-form expressions that are attractive to the user equipment (UE) implementation.