Enabling Wearables Towards the Metaverse: Trade-offs involving Blockage and Heat

Immersive and extended reality (XR) represents one of the most exciting applications of beyond-5G networks, paving the way towards the metaverse. Wearable devices (wearables for short) are the core component of XR and, being small and lightweight, face several unique challenges. Most notably, they must handle large amounts of complex computations despite their limited processing power, which can lead to device overheating. This issue becomes more pronounced when heavy computational tasks cannot be offloaded to the edge due to connectivity issues like blockage. In this work, we aim at identifying the best approach for delivering XR services, considering that both local and edge-based XR processing can be combined to best cope with challenging operational conditions, most importantly, channel blockage and device overheating. Through numerical experiments based on real-world wearables, we demonstrate that balancing the trade-offs between heat management and blockage mitigation leads to the best performance and quality of experience for XR applications.