Assessing a Private 5G SA and a Public 5G NSA Architecture for Networked Music Performances

Networked Music Performance (NMP) systems enable displaced musicians to play together. Recent advances in 5G technologies open novel possibilities for running NMPs over cellular wireless networks. However, tests on 5G support for NMPs are still limited to date, and typically restricted to specific use cases or architectures. In this paper we consider two 5G architectures, a private 5G standalone (SA) network with edge computing infrastructure, and a pre-commercial public 5G non-standalone (NSA) network. We analyze their capability to support NMPs in terms of four network metrics, namely end-to-end latency, packet error ratio, missed packets, and maximum number of consecutive missed packets. For our measurements we involved a jitter buffer of 10.66 ms. The results for the private 5G SA architecture show that the network was stable and capable of guaranteeing the latency and reliability requirements needed to ensure a realistic music interplay. Latency was constantly below 23 ms, whereas packet losses occurred with a probability of less than 0.01 on average. Conversely, the public 5G NSA architecture was insufficient to support NMPs, as the performance of the network in terms of latency and reliability were well above the perceptual thresholds that musicians can tolerate. These results suggest that public cellular 5G SA architectures with edge computing support are required for realistic real-time musical interactions.