Overview of NR Enhancements for Extended Reality (XR) in 3GPP 5G-Advanced

Extended reality (XR) is unlocking numerous possibilities and continues attracting individuals and larger groups across different business sectors. With Virtual reality (VR), Augmented reality (AR), or Mixed reality (MR) it is possible to improve the way we access, deliver and exchange information in education, health care, entertainment, and many other aspects of our daily lives. However, to fully exploit the potential of XR, it is important to provide reliable, fast and secure wireless connectivity to the users of XR and that requires refining existing solutions and tailoring those to support XR services. This article presents an overview of 3GPP 5G-Advanced Release 18 XR activities, summarizing physical as well as higher layer enhancements introduced for NR considering the specifics of XR. In addition, we also describe enhancements across 5G system architecture that impacted radio access network. Furthermore, the paper provides system-level simulation results for several Release 18 enhancements to show their benefits in terms of XR capacity and power saving gains. Finally, it concludes with an overview of future work in Release 19 that continues developing features to support XR services.