Towards a Networking Architecture for the Musical Metaverse: The MUSMET Vision

The Musical Metaverse (MM) relates to a vision of an immersive environment that enables and augments social musical activities involving distant musicians and audience members. Currently, this emerging field of research faces several technical challenges that prevent its realization. This paper identifies such challenges and proposes a research agenda to address them, which falls within the research program of the MUSMET project, recently funded by the European Innovation Council. A cornerstone of such an agenda is a networking architecture specific for the MM, which makes extensive use of 5G and beyond 5G technologies to realize the project vision. We present the main hardware and software components of such an architecture, including the end nodes, the edge devices, and the cloud, considering the strict quality of service and quality of experience constraints imposed by MM applications.