Enabling the IoT Machine Age With 5G: Machine-Type Multicast Services for Innovative Real-Time Applications

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) will shortly be undergoing a major transformation from a sensor-driven paradigm to one that is heavily complemented by actuators, drones and robots. The real-time situational awareness of such active systems requires sensed data to be transmitted in the uplink to edge-cloud, processed and control instructions transmitted in the downlink. Since many of these applications will be mission critical, the most suitable connectivity family will be cellular due to the availability of licensed spectrum able to protect the offered communications service. However, while much focus in the past was on the uplink of machine-type communications (MTC), little attention has been paid to the end-to-end reliability, latency and energy consumption comprising both up and downlinks. To address this gap, in this paper we focus on the definition, design and analysis of machine-type multicast service (MtMS). We discuss the different procedures that need to be re-designed for MtMS and we derive the most appropriate design drivers by analyzing different performance indicators such as scalability, reliability, latency and energy consumption. We also discuss the open issues to be considered in future research aimed at enhancing the capabilities of MtMS to support a wide variety of 5G IoT use cases.

Characterizing Delay and Control Traffic of the Cellular MME With IoT Support

“…Note that these works tackle the IoT support in cellular networks from the perspective of centralized IoT transmission coding/decoding, but they do not take into account IoT optimized control procedures, such as the CIoT. Among the studies that do account for the core network, most, including [22], [23], envision a virtualized network, where network functions are implemented through VNFs. Unlike our work, [22] does not specifically target EPC or any of its entities.…”

“…Unlike our work, [22] does not specifically target EPC or any of its entities. The authors of [23], focusing on multicast traffic in IoT scenarios, specifically study the MME delay. Their proposed solution is to endow the SGW with some of the MME tasks, the opposite of the CIoT optimization we consider in our study.…”

Open-source RANs in Practice: an Over-The-Air Deployment for 5G MEC

“…The final version will be published at the European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC2019), June 18-21, Valencia, Spain, 2019. However, edge application development and deployment are currently challenging in RANs. First, RANs, with or without MEC, have challenging requirements on E2E latency, energy consumption and reliability with both up and downlinks [2], [3]. Second, edge applications are envisioned as both dataand computation-intensive.…”

On the Feasibility of MAC and PHY Split in Cloud RAN

“…Besides giving users mobile broadband services, 5G is also expected to provide technological solutions for time sensitive communications with the rising of different vertical domains, such as industrial networking [1], the Tactile Internet [2], or various scenarios within Internet of Things [3]. The wide range of services being provided is changing the paradigm of cellular networks, and concepts as common as cells are no longer relevant.…”