Internet of Audio Things, Future Vision, Open Challenges, and Research Opportunities

Internet of Audio Things (IoAuT) is an emerging paradigm that integrates intelligent audio processing, ubiquitous connectivity, and edge-cloud computing resources to enable a network of devices capable of sensing, analyzing, and exchanging sound-based information seamlessly across distributed environments. This technology supports a wide range of applications, ranging from interactive musical performances to intelligent environmental monitoring, that play a significant role in everyday life. Although this technology holds great potential and could be highly useful across many domains in the future, its reliance on real-time audio streaming and distributed sensing introduces several communication and quality of service (QoS) challenges, such as latency, bandwidth limitations, packet loss during audio transmission, resource management, and energy-efficient networking, all of which directly affect its usability and scalability. In this article, we provide the first holistic analysis of IoAuT applications from a QoS and communication perspective. We systematically review artistic, functional, and industrial use cases to explore how performance and sustainability tradeoffs shape system design. Unlike prior reviews, our study introduces a unified architecture taxonomy and sustainability-enabled QoS metrics to evaluate network efficiency, interoperability, and energy use. We further examine the roles of edge computing, adaptive streaming, and dynamic resource allocation in achieving reliable and low-latency audio transmission. Finally, the article highlights open challenges and suggests future research directions to help build IoAuT applications that can scale, work well with other systems, and reduce their impact on the environment.