Latency and Reliability Analysis of a 5G-Enabled Internet of Musical Things System

The availability of high-performance embedded audio systems, along with high-bandwidth and low-latency connectivity options provided by 5G networks, is enabling the Internet of Musical Things (IoMusT) paradigm. A central component of this paradigm is represented by networked music performances (NMPs), where geographically displaced musicians play together over the network in real time. However, to date, IoMusT deployments over 5G networks remain scarce, and very limited statistical results are available on the actual latency and reliability of 5G networks for IoMusT and NMP scenarios. In this article, we present a private 5G IoMusT deployment and analyze its performance when supporting NMPs. Our IoMusT system is composed of up to four nodes and includes different background traffic conditions. We focused on the assessment of the sole wireless link, as the measurements can be easily transferred to a realistic NMP architecture involving a wide area network (WAN) by compounding them with those of the WAN. Our results show that latency increases with the number of nodes and with the presence of background traffic, whereas the reliability did not vary with the complexity of the conditions. For all tested scenarios, the average measured latency was below 24 ms (including a jitter buffer of 10.66 ms), whereas packet losses occurred with a probability of less than 0.01. However, irregular spikes were found for all latency and reliability metrics, which can significantly reduce the quality of service perceived by the users of NMP applications. Finally, packet loss and latency resulted to be uncorrelated, which suggests that they have different root causes.