Enhancing 5G QoS Management for XR Traffic through XR Loopback Mechanism

5G networks are designed to support a variety of services with highly demanding Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements. This opened the door for novel extended reality (XR) media applications to emerge with 5G. However, recent 5G field tests and system-level simulation studies show that further XR enhancements are required to support a massive adoption of XR services in 5G networks. Such enhancements are expected to come into play with 5G-Advanced. In this line, we propose and study an XR loopback mechanism that adapts the XR traffic to the instantaneous 5G network conditions by exploiting an XR application feedback. We propose various XR loopback algorithms, strategies, and parameters' configurations and study their impact on the 5G end-to-end performance. We conduct extensive simulation campaigns by building realistic end-to-end 5G network scenarios with 3GPP mixed XR traffic setups. Results show that the proposed XR loopback mechanism can boost XR performance in 5G networks by adapting to 5G network conditions, while keeping the XR QoS requirements under control. We provide various insights and practical directions on XR loopback design that allow us to take full advantage of the 5G network capabilities and progress toward 5G-Advanced network design.