Impact of Extended Reality Applications on Communication Protocol Design

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master_Shi_Yuying_2024.pdf (7.95 MB)

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School of Electrical Engineering | Master's thesis
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2024-10-12

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Communications Engineering

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Master's Programme in Computer, Communication and Information Sciences

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en

Pages

63

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Abstract

In recent years, extended reality (XR) has emerged as one of the most groundbreaking technologies, significantly impacting various fields and aiming to create immersive virtual experiences for users. Effective implementation of XR relies on high bandwidth and ultra-low latency network connections, with the advent of 5G greatly advancing the further development and application of XR technologies. Since 2016, the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) has consistently identified and standardized enhancements in radio technologies to better support XR services. These enhancements include protocol data unit (PDU) set-based quality of service (QoS) handling and discontinuous reception (DRX) technique for power saving. The former allows networks to provide more stable and reliable services for demanding applications, such as XR, through more integrated data processing. The latter enables XR devices to periodically turn off their receivers, which is crucial for reducing battery consumption and extending device battery life. The thesis performs in-depth traffic analyses for real-world traces captured from various XR applications to identify XR-specific traffic patterns. These analyses are crucial in evaluating the feasibility of the enhancements proposed by 3GPP and identifying any gaps between theoretical specifications and practical application requirements. The results indicate that PDU set-based QoS handling is well-suited for XR services, given the observed traffic patterns. Treating a video slice as a PDU set, rather than the entire video frame, is more practical. In this context, traditional real-time transport protocol (RTP) headers are insufficient for identifying PDU sets, highlighting the need for RTP header extension. Moreover, system-level simulations are conducted to design the DRX technique to optimize communication protocols by enhancing power saving. The design process is closely tied to the insights from traffic analyses, considering the observed XR traffic behaviors. Simulation results demonstrate that using the DRX technique can lead to power saving gains (PSG) but may also introduce a capacity loss (CL). Nevertheless, suitable DRX configuration options can still be determined based on the traffic characteristics. Additionally, the findings reiterate that treating a video slice as a PDU set is more suitable than treating the entire video frame as such.

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Supervisor

Jäntti, Riku

Thesis advisor

Tafintsev, Nikita

Keywords

XR, 3GPP, PDU set, data burst, PDU set-based QoS handling, DRX

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https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-202412177973

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