Cellular 5G Access for Massive Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the paradigm of physical and virtual “things” that communicate and collaborate over the Internet, with minimal or no human intervention. There are multiple ways in which an IoT device can be connected to the Internet. Cellular technologies are seen as viable candidates in this respect, due to their maturity, worldwide availability and the use of reserved spectrum. However, current cellular systems are not well-equipped to efficiently and reliably support IoT traffic, particularly in the radio access part, as they are designed for low number of high-rate connections and not for high number of low-rate IoT connections. In this chapter we outline the main features of the IoT traffic types, review operation of the current cellular access and provide some guidelines how to address its shortcomings and evolve it in order to support IoT services. However, it is likely that there is no one-size-fits-all solution that will be adopted for the future cellular standards. Instead, one should adopt a vertical approach and differentiate among the IoT traffic types already at the radio network access, resulting in a suite of access protocols, each optimized for a specific IoT traffic type.