Cooperative access resource orchestration for extended reality services in spatially dense scenarios

Mobile Extended Reality (XR) communication services offer unparalleled opportunities across various verticals, but present specific challenges due to their high throughput requirements, often in the hundreds of Mbps, and stringent end-to-end delay constraints, usually as low as a few milliseconds. To address these challenges, we propose the eXtended Reality-Oriented Orchestration of Access Resources (X-OAR), designed to support XR applications, by leveraging next-generation network access technologies, even in densely populated environments. X-OAR integrates cooperatively scheduled radio access network resources with edge computing capabilities. X-OAR complies with the stringent delay requirements defined by 3GPP for XR quality of experience through cooperative joint edge and radio resources scheduling. We formulate the delay minimization problem using a graph-based approach and introduce a greedy algorithm that reduces orchestration complexity and prior knowledge of user subscription data. Numerical simulations demonstrate that X-OAR's cooperative scheduling outperforms state-of-the-art solutions, delivering superior XR quality of experience. Furthermore, X-OAR paves the way for future research on extending orchestration to application-layer strategies and resource-aware charging policies.