Efficient IoT Gateway over 5G Wireless: A New Design with Prototype and Implementation Results

The growth of IoT is expected to herald a better quality of life and open up new industrial opportunities. However, it is also raising new challenges in resource constrained wireless networks. Originally designed for human-to-human wireless communications, present wireless networks fail to satisfy the huge connectivity and varying traffic requirements of IoT. Next generation 5G wireless networks are expected to exploit emerging features, like mmWave, massive MIMO, and C-RAN, for providing the enormous connectivity, resource pooling, and energy efficiency required to support commercial rollout of IoT. Exploring these emerging features, we develop 5G-enabled IoT gateways to communicate with the RRHs of 5G C-RAN. The gateways are endowed with efficient compression schemes to significantly improve uplink resource utilization. Our 5G C-RAN prototyping and laboratory experimental results point out a huge opportunity for supporting a massive number of IoT-enabled devices by sophisticated 5G C-RAN deployment and efficient IoT gateway development.