On the Impact of 5G Slicing on an Internet of Musical Things System

Considering the specific quality-of-service requirements of Internet of Musical Things (IoMusT) deployments, 5G networks are deemed as a key enabling technology to support IoMusT applications as needed, e.g., in networked music performance (NMP) settings. Slicing, in particular, is a promising feature of 5G networks, as it could help dedicate specific resources to NMP traffic, so as to schedule NMP communications with higher priority and thus guarantee swift delivery delays and higher reliability. Moreover, handling NMP traffic via a slice residing on a geographically closer multi-access edge computing (MEC) server would help significantly reduce WAN transit times for NMP traffic. In this paper, we conduct the first tests with slicing in 5G networks supporting IoMusT applications (to the best of our knowledge). We conduct our tests by decoupling WAN transit times from the radio access performance (evaluated in terms of latency, error rate, number of lost packets, and maximum length of a packet loss burst). Our results show that slicing, even when introducing slight extra delays due to UPF implementation or hardware specifications, is a potentially excellent choice to save on WAN transit times for NMP traffic while delivering the same reliability as the operator’s core network equipment.