Cellular Evolution: Impact of 4G & 5G on IoT, and Future Prospects

Raju is a passionate technology professional with around 25 years of cross-functional experience across numerous tech companies. In a recent interaction with Thiruamuthan (Correspondent, Industry Outlook), he shared his insights on various aspects pertaining to how 4G and 5G technologies are disrupting the IoT space, and even shared his thoughts on what to expect from the 6G roll-out in the future.

How has the integration of 4G and 5G technologies impacted the IoT landscape?

The primary focus of 4G was the Mobile Broadband (MBB) to increase the data rates for mobile users. 3GPP had evolved over a period and did the necessary work starting from Release 8 by defining the Cat1 device category dedicated to IoT use cases requiring a few Mbps of date rates and went on to define another device category called LTE-M and NB-IoT in Release 13 to address the low cost and low power requirements for the IoT use cases which require few 10s to 100s of kbps data rates. In Release 14, a cost-optimized variant of Cat1, called Cat1bis was defined to address the commercial viability of the IoT market. Higher capacity devices requiring a few 10s to a few 100s of Mbps are addressed with LTE Cat4 and above. 

The first objective of 5G was again to address enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) that enables a few Gbps of data rates. 5G also offers ultra-reliable low latency communications (urLLC) for gaming, industrial, medical, and banking and massive machine-type communication (mMTC) for massive IoT. While eMBB and urLLC were addressed in Release 15, it was decided to address the mMTC with 4G LTE-M and NB-IoT. Overall, cellular has proven to be an ideal connectivity option ever since the dawn of 2G and will continue to play a major role in the future beyond 5G also, as it is scalable, secure, highly reliable, and easily available. 

Throw some light on the key challenges associated with incorporating 4G and 5G into IoT.

The solutions designed with Releases 15 and Release 16 with the emergence of 5G address the needs of eMBB and urLLC, but do not efficiently address the needs of IoT. With 4G LTE, the industry has optimized the modules, networks, and solutions to address the needs of mMTC with Cat1, Cat1bis, LTE-M, and NB IoT in terms of power consumption and price for the required scale. Even though LTE-M and NB-IoT are adopted in 5G, the alternatives for the lower LTE categories started evolving from Release 17 called the NR Redcap (Reduced capability). In contrast to rigidly defined LTE categories, NR Redcap upscaled the data rates up to 240Mbps and downscaled the data rates up to 90Mbps under the same terminology. Additionally, a lower power mode called MICO (Mobile Initiated Connection Only) was introduced to allow for longer battery life. The Redcap can reach the price point of the LTE Cat4 module, but it is still far away from the price that can be achieved with Cat1bis and LTE CAT-M/NB-IoT. So, we need to continue to evolve the standards to address the low to mid-end IoT applications for telematics, smart metering, smart city, smart home, and many more. 

Elaborate the impact of 5G on specific industries within the IoT space.

To function best, IoT requires low latency, high reliability with flawless connectivity in certain industries. When combined, 5G and IoT can bring a lot of benefits to businesses. Companies can set up their own private 5G to facilitate flexibility, and control and secure themselves from potential hackers. In large factories that have thousands of machines, sensors, and equipment pumping data at the same time, delivering high reliability, low latency, and high speed is a huge advantage. Moreover, productivity can be improved by collecting and analyzing real-time data. While in agriculture, drones can collect data from huge numbers of sensors in a big field and can be aggregated through a central gateway, in healthcare, remote surgeries are now a possibility. Additionally, VR can benefit from high speed and low latency, and video surveillance can benefit from real-time streaming with high-definition videos. Entertainment, logistics, retail, and education are a few other key sectors that can also benefit a lot through 5G and IoT integration.

Going forward, what advantages do you expect 6G to offer over 5G in addressing IoT requirements?

As 6G is expected to evolve on top of 5G, it will not be revolutionary, but evolutionary! The common vision from the initial 6G research is to connect the physical world with the human world. We can see a lot of sensing and communication happening in the digital world. Integrated sensing & communication (ISAC) and Integrated AI and communication (IAIAC) are added on top of the 5G objectives with eMBB as Immersive communication, urLLC as extreme communication, and mMTC as massive communication. 6G also enhances both human and machine communication by enabling the services and evolving the network capabilities. While services here include interactive mapping, digital twins & virtual worlds, 3D hyper-accurate positioning, localization & tracking, digital healthcare, smart industry 4.0, and many more, network evolution includes trusted native AI (AIaaS), spectrum coverage expansion, and energy efficiency. The major thrust from 6G is expected to come in immersive communications, ISAC, IAIAC, Integration of non-terrestrial & terrestrial networks, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS), distributed computing, and many others.

Further, next-generation wireless networks demand high-quality wireless connectivity as well as highly accurate and robust sensing capabilities. So, the close cooperation of communication and sensing (radar) functions can enable significant improvements in spectrum efficiency, reduction of device size, reduced cost, and power consumption. The major challenges for making ISAC a reality are channel modeling & evaluation methodology, joint waveform (radar and communication) & signal processing design, hardware co-design, sensing-assisted communication, and communication-assisted collaborative sensing