Realizing Internet of Things with Network Slicing: Opportunities and Challenges

Internet of Things (IoT) is a lucrative technology within the modern community that realizes the concept of the smart world, by expanding within a myriad of applications. Existing wireless networks require a radical change to fulfill the network requirements and cater the rapid expansion of the IoT ecosystem. 5G architecture is specifically designed to facilitate this demand. Network slicing is a pivotal technology in 5G architecture that has the ability to divide the physical network into multiple logical networks with specific network characteristics. In this paper, we are going to analyze how network slicing can be helpful in the IoT realization. Technical aspects that are required in the IoT realization, and the slicing based solutions which address these aspects, will be discussed here. Moreover, technical challenges that can arise due to network slicing integration in IoT ecosystem, will also be discussed with the potential solutions.