Performance Evaluation of Energy Saving Solutions for XR Devices in 5G-Advanced Networks

As extended reality (XR) services evolve, the XR device form factor may be critical for the mass market adoption. Offloading some of the heavy application processing functions of the device to remote servers is a method to reduce the device compute requirements and, consequently, the battery size and consumption. 5G-and-beyond mobile networks will support XR devices with compute offload, which will, in turn, increase the network traffic. This XR traffic is latency-bounded, so its delay requirements must be fulfilled, while consuming little device energy for communication. This paper presents a thorough performance evaluation of user equipment (UE) energy saving solutions, for XR traffic. Solutions standardized in 3GPP up to 5G-Advanced Release 18 and non-standardized solutions are considered. The simulation results show that power saving gains of 6-23% can be achieved without delaying traffic unacceptably, depending on the XR traffic characteristics and network load.