5G Internet of Things: A survey

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Abstract

The existing 4G networks have been widely used in the Internet of Things (IoT) and is continuously evolving to match the needs of the future Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The 5G networks are expected to massive expand today’s IoT that can boost cellular operations, IoT security, and network challenges and driving the Internet future to the edge. The existing IoT solutions are facing a number of challenges such as large number of connection of nodes, security, and new standards. This paper reviews the current research state-of-the-art of 5G IoT, key enabling technologies, and main research trends and challenges in 5G IoT.

Introduction

The evolving of fifth generation (5G) networks is becoming more readily available as a major driver of the growth of IoT applications [2]. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) report, the global 5G services will drive 70% of companies to spend $1.2 billion on the connectivity management solutions [2]. New applications and business models in the future IoT require new performance criteria such as massive connectivity, security, trustworthy, coverage of wireless communication, ultra-low latency, throughput, ultra-reliable, et al. for huge number of IoT devices [4]. To meet these requirements, the evolving Long Term Evolution (LTE) and 5G technologies are expected to provide new connectivity interfaces for the future IoT applications. The development of next generation of “5G” is at its early stage, which aims at new radio access technology (RAT), antenna improvements, use of higher frequencies, and re-architecting of the networks [5], [6]. However, main progresses have been made and the evolution of LTE needs to be complemented with a radical change within the next few years in the fundamentals of wireless networks - a generational shift in technology and architectures and business process.

According to the Gartner, up to 8.4 billion IoT devices will be in connected through machine-to-machine (M2M) by 2017 and this number will reach 20.4 billion by 2020 [1], [10]. The 5G enabled IoT (5G-IoT) will connect massive number of IoT devices and make contributions to meet market demand for wireless services to stimulate new economic and social development [59]. The new requirements of applications in the future IoT and the evolving of 5G wireless technology are two significant trends are driving the 5G enabled IoT [59].

In the past few years, many research efforts have been made on both 5G technologies and the future IoT. A number of key enabling technicals in 5G are developed to offer new infrastructure and design with inherent capabilities required by the future IoT [3]. The authors reviewed most recent research results from two major academic databases (IEEE Xplore and ScienceDirect)to understand the current status and future research on both 5G and IoT. We noticed that in the past four years from 2014 to 1st Jan 2018, 389 IoT and 5G related papers have been published by IEEE Xplore and 588 papers have been published by ScienceDirect. Fig. 1 indicates the number of articles stored in IEEE Xplore and ScienceDirect from 2014 to 2018.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the background and current research of 5G and IoT. Section 3 provides an in-depth review of key enabling technologies that make 5G-IoT possible. Section 4 discusses research challenges and future trends. Section 5 concludes the paper.

Section snippets

Background and current research of both 5G and IoT

In the heterogeneous IoT, a number of wireless technologies, such as 2G/3G/4G, WiFi, Bluetooth, etc., have been used in IoT applications, in which billion of devices will be connected by wireless communication technologies [20]. The 2G networks (currently covers 90% of the world’s population) are designed for voice, 3G (currently covers 65% of the world’s population) for voice and data, and the 4G (since 2012) for broadband internet experiences. The 3G and 4G are widely used for IoT but not

Requirements in 5G enabled IoT

The IoT is revolutionizing our everyday lives provisioning a wide range of novel applications leverage on ecosystems of smart and highly heterogeneous devices. In the past few years, many research efforts have been made on many challenging topics for the 5G IoT, and the main requirements of IoT include:

  • High data rate, the future IoT applications, such as high-definition video streaming, virtual reality (VR), or augmented reality (AR) et al., require higher data rates at around 25 Mbps to

Key enabling technologies in 5G-IoT

The 5G enabled IoT includes a number of key enabling techniques from the physical communication to IoT applications. Fig. 6 describes the main technologies associated with 5G-IoT [47]. In this review, we summarized the key enabling technologies into follow five major categories: (1) 5G enabled wireless connectivity; (2) 5G-IoT architecture; (3) devices-to-device communication; (4) 5G-IoT applications; and (5) data and cloud analysis in 5G-IoT (Fig. 8).

Research challenges and future trends

The 5G provides features that can satisfy the requirements of the future IoT, however, it also opens new set of interesting research challenges on the architecture of 5G-IoT, trusted communications between devices, security issues, etc. The 5G-IoT integrates a number of technologies and is creating significant impact on applications in IoT. In this section, we will review the potential research challenges and future trends in 5G-IoT.

Conclusion

The 5G-IoT integrates the emerging 5G techniques into future IoT. This paper reviews the recent research on both 5G and IoT. We firstly introduce the background and current research on 5G and IoT. Then, we analyse the new requirements in 5G enabled IoT. Afterwards, we detailed the key techniques in 5G-IoT and analysed the challenge and trends of the future IoT.

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