Commercial 4G LTE cellular networks for supporting emerging IoT applications

This paper presents a detailed realistic performance analysis and feasibility assessment of commercial LTE cellular networks when used to support a diverse set of emerging IoT applications ranging from mission-critical applications that require ultra-reliable and stringent E2E latency to those that require support of massive number of connected devices with relaxed latency and reliability requirements (e. g., smart meters). Since total uplink (UL) traffic of most of these IoT applications is higher than total downlink (DL) traffic, we focus our analysis only on UL performance. It is shown that current commercial 4G LTE systems can't support emerging mission-critical IoT applications with latency requirements of less than 100 ms. 4G LTE systems can satisfy the requirements of IoT applications when latency requirements are > 150 ms.