COVER FEATURE
INGENIEUR
COVER FEATURE
INGENIEUR
Connecting a World of Things
By Li Changwei and Wu Ling
Come 2025 there will be 100 billion IoT connections. How can telecommunication companies get into the driving seats?
Connectivity sits at the heart of interaction, innovation, value, and experience, with more connections coalescing into a sustainable ecosystem. With IoT gathering momentum, telecommunication companies( telcos) need to target their strengths, business models, and strategies towards forming an ecosystem that benefits the whole industry.
From Voice to Data to IoT
With the inception of 3G in 2000 and then 4G a decade later, communication has shifted from voice-dominant to data-dominant, with traffic generated by Internet Protocol( IP) applications and Internetized Over-The-Top( OTT) services.
In 2017, machine-to-machine( M2M) connections exceeded the number of human connections, reshaping communication networks, operations, and services. At Mobile World Congress( MWC) 2017, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son predicted that the number of connected things will exceed 50 billion in the next five years and 100 billion in the next 10 years. According to Son, IoT will generate untold opportunities for terminals in the area of data generation, the cloud in terms of data analysis, and artificial intelligence across the board.
2017 was a breakthrough year for IoT following the official global launch of Narrow Band or NB- IoT standards in June 2016 and the availability of US $ 1 dollar IoT chips in the US. 4G Long-
Term Evolution( LTE) networks are becoming widespread, with penetration exceeding 20 %. We’ re reaching a point where the conditions are right for wide-scale hyper-connectivity and an explosion in apps.
Horizontal & Vertical
The diversity of IoT application scenarios in different industries( horizontal) and specialized requirements( vertical) are reshaping services, networks, operations, and business models. Because IoT service scenarios are flexible, change in real-time, and offer infinite expandability, networks and platforms need to support breadth, depth, speed, low latency, cost efficiency, and security.
Resulting trends include 5G, which is necessary for driverless vehicles to avoid collisions due to millisecond latency and 10-Gbps transmission speeds. Software Defined Networking( SDN) and Network Functional Virtualization( NFV) will enable prioritized on-demand services. And the topdown construction of content delivery networks will transform cloud computing architecture into fog computing, integrating pipes and clouds to guarantee transmission and latency requirements when capacity continually expands.
The diversity of access terminals and near-field access technologies are creating new challenges
20 VOL 73 JANUARY-MARCH 2018