Wireless communication research challenges for Extended Reality (XR)

Extended Reality (XR) is an umbrella term that includes Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR), and Virtual Reality (VR). XR has a tremendous market size and will profoundly transform our lives by changing the way we interact with the physical world. However, existing XR devices are mainly tethered by cables which limit users' mobility and Quality-of-Experience (QoE). Wireless XR leverages existing and future wireless technologies, such as 5G, 6G, and Wi-Fi, to remove cables that are tethered to the head-mounted devices. Such changes can free users and enable a plethora of applications. High-quality ultimate XR requires an uncompressed data rate up to 2.3 Tbps with an end-to-end latency lower than 10 ms. Although 5G has significantly improved data rates and reduced latency, it still cannot meet such high requirements. This paper provides a roadmap towards wireless ultimate XR. The basics, existing products, and use cases of AR, MR, and VR are reviewed, upon which technical requirements and bottlenecks of realizing ultimate XR using wireless technologies are identified. Challenges of utilizing 6G wireless systems and the next generation Wi-Fi systems and future research directions are provided.