Internet Of Things And The Evolution Of Mobile Networks

The IoT is a hot topic and for good reason. It generated much customer interest at this month's Optus Wholesale Spark event because the potential of IOT is enormous. In essence, IoT is the trend toward the interconnection of real world objects and devices, and their associated processes and data, via existing or new networking infrastructure. It represents the next evolution of the internet from machines to people and now everything else.

IOT REALITIES

The hype surrounding IoT is underpinned by growth predictions; Gartner predicts there will be 20.8 billion “things” connected by 2020.

If that seems like an unlikely future-state keep in mind that the IoT is already here amongst us. Think smart watches and clever toys for starters, as well as the rollout of “Smart Cities”.

The IoT market is being driven and enabled by a number of trends including the proliferation of Internet-enabled devices; wireless network ubiquity; consumer interest in connected wearables; large investments in IoT by influential companies; the promise of enhanced analytics (events based, predictive); and large-scale cloud and big data deployments. IoT is also expected to transform much of the economy.

GENERATION GAP

Over time existing mobile networks will struggle to handle the predicted explosion in the number and diversity of devices and sensors each with different connectivity needs.

The growing demands that will come with the sheer number and divergence of concurrently running devices will soon outstrip what can be supplied by existing mobile networks and a completely new more powerful mobile network will in time become essential.

The IoT represents a paradigm shift. In terms of network demand, it’s not just about capacity. The new network will need to be qualitatively different to the ones we have now, because the things it will need to support are not just more of the same. There will be a huge range of devices that will have different connectivity needs and profiles.

While some will need the same type of bandwidth as existing networked devices, such as smartphones, the majority will not. IoT devices may demand higher throughputs but they will also need to support long-range connectivity as well as low power consumption devices such as ‘always-on’ sensors.

And let’s keep in mind that we’re talking about potentially millions of devices each with different connectivity profiles.  These could range from fire extinguishers that blip 2kB once a week through to a Smart City. This more complex demand will require a distinctly different network.

5G promises to deliver the required latency and bandwidth improvements to answer those challenges. Whereas 4G was an incremental improvement on 3G and 3G was an improvement on 2G, 5G will be quite different. A new 5G radio interface will be required to be defined to meet the requirements of some of the higher-speed, lower-latency use cases. However, the 5G ecosystem will provide multi-access connectivity that can make opportunistic use of LTE-Advanced, wi-fi and Low-Power Wide-Area (LPWA) technologies such as Narrowband-IoT.

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