Internet of Things in the 5G Era: Enablers, Architecture, and Business Models

TLDR

The IoT promises to transform daily life through seamless interactions among many heterogeneous devices, yet its diverse connectivity landscape and fragmentation hinder full realization. The paper argues that 5G’s ubiquity, reliability, scalability, and cost‑efficiency can serve as a pivotal enabler for the emerging global IoT. The authors review current IoT connectivity options and identify 5G’s core enablers—enhanced mobile broadband, ultra‑reliable low‑latency communications, and massive machine‑type communications—to assess their suitability for IoT. They conclude that linking IoT and 5G will trigger significant business model changes for operators and vendors, reshaping the ecosystem.

Abstract

The IoT paradigm holds the promise to revolutionize the way we live and work by means of a wealth of new services, based on seamless interactions between a large amount of heterogeneous devices. After decades of conceptual inception of the IoT, in recent years a large variety of communication technologies has gradually emerged, reflecting a large diversity of application domains and of communication requirements. Such heterogeneity and fragmentation of the connectivity landscape is currently hampering the full realization of the IoT vision, by posing several complex integration challenges. In this context, the advent of 5G cellular systems, with the availability of a connectivity technology, which is at once truly ubiquitous, reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient, is considered as a potentially key driver for the yet-to emerge global IoT. In the present paper, we analyze in detail the potential of 5G technologies for the IoT, by considering both the technological and standardization aspects. We review the present-day IoT connectivity landscape, as well as the main 5G enablers for the IoT. Last but not least, we illustrate the massive business shifts that a tight link between IoT and 5G may cause in the operator and vendors ecosystem.