Practical Guide to LTE-A, VoLTE and IoT

7IoT Evolution Towards a Super‐connected World

7.1 Overview

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the key components of digital and digital transformation along with big data and analytics. Together with big data, analytics, and the cloud, the IoT can help enable numerous possibilities and new opportunities. These possibilities will impact our daily lives substantially and open new business models for enterprises; the number of connected IoT devices could go up to 50 billion by 2022.

In this chapter, we will cover the evolution of the Internet of Things from different aspects. We will focus on 3GPP cellular IoT evolution for connectivity, i.e., narrowband IoT (NB‐IoT). Prior to a detailed technical description of the NB‐IoT, we will summarize the IoT evolution from an end‐to‐end perspective, including the IoT platform, IoT protocols, connectivity, and the sensors layer. The IoT evolution is different from the regular mobile evolution; the latter is focusing on connectivity only, while the IoT evolution should be addressed from end to end. This is because the IoT connectivity is only 5% to 10% of the IoT value chain and therefore, a service provider should focus on the end‐to‐end use case. From a customer perspective, the most important factor is the outcome of the IoT use case and the associated business case (BC) behind it. Therefore, the focus on connectivity has been driven by the legacy telecom vendor as the main factor, while this is not the case from a commercial point of view. ...