Internet of Things (IoT) for Next-Generation Smart Systems: A Review of Current Challenges, Future Trends and Prospects for Emerging 5G-IoT Scenarios

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT)-centric concepts like augmented reality, high-resolution video streaming, self-driven cars, smart environment, e-health care, etc. have a ubiquitous presence now. These applications require higher data-rates, large bandwidth, increased capacity, low latency and high throughput. In light of these emerging concepts, IoT has revolutionized the world by providing seamless connectivity between heterogeneous networks (HetNets). The eventual aim of IoT is to introduce the plug and play technology providing the end-user, ease of operation, remotely access control and configurability. This paper presents the IoT technology from a bird's eye view covering its statistical/architectural trends, use cases, challenges and future prospects. The paper also presents a detailed and extensive overview of the emerging 5G-IoT scenario. Fifth Generation (5G) cellular networks provide key enabling technologies for ubiquitous deployment of the IoT technology. These include carrier aggregation, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), massive-MIMO (M-MIMO), coordinated multipoint processing (CoMP), device-to-device (D2D) communications, centralized radio access network (CRAN), software-defined wireless sensor networking (SD-WSN), network function virtualization (NFV) and cognitive radios (CRs). This paper presents an exhaustive review for these key enabling technologies and also discusses the new emerging use cases of 5G-IoT driven by the advances in artificial intelligence, machine and deep learning, ongoing 5G initiatives, quality of service (QoS) requirements in 5G and its standardization issues. Finally, the paper discusses challenges in the implementation of 5G-IoT due to high data-rates requiring both cloud-based platforms and IoT devices based edge computing.