Interplay of User Behavior, Communication, and Computing in Immersive Reality 6G Applications

Emerging extended reality (XR) services and applications that submerge users into a virtual universe pave the way towards ubiquitous contextualized experiences. Immersive interactions on-the-go not only bring new use cases but also distract users from the real world and modify their behavior and motion, which in turn may affect the operation of communication networks. This article explores the effects of XR user motion from the communication and computing perspectives. To this end, we offer a review of mobility patterns in XR and a detailed simulation study on the impact of interaction-dependent gait patterns on the delay and resource utilization. The results confirm the uniqueness of XR applications in terms of the user behavior patterns, which calls for novel application-centric algorithms, protocols, and mechanisms to facilitate high-performance connectivity under demanding XR requirements.