5G networks provide wireless connectivity to Extended Reality

Extended Reality, which encompasses Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality, will be the next generation computing platform that aims to create virtual experiences indistinguishable from reality according to the new whitepaper of 5G Americas Extended Reality and 3GPP Evolution.

Chris Pearson, president of 5G Americas, highlights that Extended Reality (XR) "will greatly impact the way people play, work, learn and connect. Its use cases have a broad impact on companies, institutions, education, first responders and manufacturing."

There are numerous XR experiences with applications in a variety of scenarios. Additional VR applications may include online gaming, virtual participation in events, and educational experiences, while mobile AR use cases may include video gaming, mission-critical services, online shopping, multi-party spatial audio calling and conferencing, and digital co-design.

5G New Radio (NR) developed by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is designed to support emerging XR use cases that require rigorous key performance indicators. Specifically, low latency, high reliability, lower power consumption, and high capacity are key requirements for the success of XR. Such demands can include quasi-periodic traffic in large chunks, irregular intervals and variable size, as well as high data rates, including uplink (UL) for AR services, simultaneous streaming of 3D video and control data over the same end-to-end connection.

Si bien la 5G beneficia a la XR, nuevos casos de uso exigirán mayores optimizaciones de extremo a extremo y mejoras potenciales para las redes 5G, que continúan evolucionando con cada nuevo release de especificación del 3GPP. Los Rel-15 y Rel-16 ofrecen una base digna para XR, pero no fueron diseñados ni optimizados específicamente para dar soporte a XR. Se prevé que las mejoras potenciales contenidas en los Rel-17 y Rel-18 optimicen el soporte para XR e incluyan sensibilidad a XR, optimizaciones de potencia y mejoras de la capacidad.

Orlett Pearson, Senior Standardization Specialist at Nokia and leader of the 5G Americas working group for this study, states that "high-quality XR is offering increasing accessibility and continues to evolve. Digital Twins, AI/ML, IoT, are integral to the evolution and implementation of

Diana Maamari, Staff Engineer at Qualcomm and co-leader of this 5G Americas working group, adds that "in addition to advances in XR technologies such as optics, projectors, display systems, graphics, audio, tracking and AI, 5G standards with specific optimizations for XR and distributed computing architectures can enable infinite at scale.”