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The networking industry is offering new services leveraging recent technological advances in connectivity, storage, and computing such as mobile communications and edge computing. In this regard, extended reality, a term encompassing virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality, can provide unprecedented user experience and pioneering service opportunities such as: live concerts, sports, and other events; interactive gaming and entertainment; immersive education, training, and demos. These services require high-bandwidth, low-latency, and reliable connections, and are supported by next-generation ultra-reliable and low-latency communications in the vision of 6G mobile communication systems. In this work, we devise a novel scheme, called backup from different data centers with multicast and adaptive bandwidth provisioning, to admit reliable, low-latency, and high-bandwidth extended reality live streams in next-generation networks. We consider network services where contents are non-cacheable and investigate how backup services can be offered by different data centers with multicast and adaptive bandwidth provisioning. Our proposed service-provisioning scheme provides protection not only against link failures in the physical network but also against computing and storage failures in data centers. We develop scalable algorithms for the service-provisioning scheme and evaluate their performance on various complex network instances in a dynamic environment. Numerical results show that, compared to conventional service-provisioning schemes such as those seeking backup services from the same data center, our proposed service-provisioning scheme efficiently utilizes network resources, ensures higher reliability, and guarantees low latency; hence, it is highly suitable for extended reality live streams. 

Network connectivity, i.e., the reachability of any network node from all other nodes, is often considered as the default network survivability metric against failures. However, in the case of a large-scale disaster disconnecting multiple network components, network connectivity may not be achievable. On the other hand, with the shifting service paradigm towards the cloud in today’s networks, most services can still be provided as long as at least a content replica is available in all disconnected network partitions. As a result, the concept of content connectivity has been introduced as a new network survivability metric under a large-scale disaster. Content connectivity is defined as the reachability of content from every node in a network under a specific failure scenario. In this work, we investigate how to ensure content connectivity in optical metro networks. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions and develop what we believe to be a novel mathematical formulation to map a virtual network over a physical network such that content connectivity for the virtual network is ensured against multiple link failures in the physical network. In our numerical results, obtained under various network settings, we compare the performance of mapping with content connectivity and network connectivity and show that mapping with content connectivity can guarantee higher survivability, lower network bandwidth utilization, and significant improvement of service availability.