DECT-2020 NR for Professional Live Audio: Design Space Exploration and Practical Evaluation

This paper presents an in-depth evaluation of the DECT-2020 New Radio (NR) standard for professional live audio applications, focusing on latency as a critical performance indicator. The evaluation uses the nRF91 modem series by Nordic Semiconductor, currently the first and only available devices with DECT-2020 support. We evaluate the potential of DECT-2020 by exploring the design space of the standard, explaining the complexity of tradeoffs between latency, RF resource utilization, and transmission robustness. We then present our measurement setup, to analyze the performance. Based on a series of practical latency measurements with different configurations, we identify potential operation points for transmitting wireless audio over DECT-2020 and conclude that the minimum achievable latency with the current DECT-2020 modem implementation is 2.312 ms, at a cost of about one-third of the RF channel resources. Our results represent a minimum latency estimation as only the physical layer is currently available as an implementation, and other key performance indicators were not considered in this work. These findings provide valuable insights into the current state of DECT-2020 for professional live audio applications and highlight areas for future exploration.