In recent years, advances in immersive multimedia technologies, such as extended reality (XR) technologies, have led to more realistic and user-friendly devices. However, these devices are often bulky and uncomfortable, still requiring tether connectivity for demanding applications. The deployment of the fifth generation of telecommunications technologies (5G) has set the basis for XR offloading solutions with the goal of enabling lighter and fully wearable XR devices. In this paper, we present a traffic dataset for two demanding XR offloading scenarios that substantially extend those available in the current state of the art, captured using a fully developed end-to-end XR offloading solution. We also propose a set of accurate traffic models for the proposed scenarios based on the captured data, accompanied by a simple and consistent method to generate synthetic data from the fitted models. Finally, using an open-source 5G radio access network (RAN) emulator, we validate the models both at the application and resource allocation layers. Overall, this work aims to provide a valuable contribution to the field with data and tools for designing, testing, improving, and extending XR offloading solutions in academia and industry.

The upcoming IEEE 802.11be standard aims to provide extremely high bitrates to support next generation use cases. Among the proposed features, multi-link operation (MLO) is probably the one contributing most towards this goal. MLO enables new types of devices, i.e., multi-link devices (MLDs), to transmit simultaneously over multiple frequency bands to achieve massive bitrates (reaching 40 Gbps) and, consequently, lower latency. However, the coexistence of MLDs with legacy devices in existing and future wireless local area network (WLAN) deployments has not yet been explicitly investigated. In this work, we investigate different band management policies over a three-band densely populated WLAN, allowing MLDs to use one or more bands for the access procedure and data transfer. We evaluate, via extensive simulations, the access delay of the devices and the network throughput with respect to the ratio of legacy devices and MLDs. We show that by using different band allocation policies for MLDs, several trade-offs regarding throughput and access delay arise that need careful consideration to avoid performance degradation.