IoT Evolution Towards a Super‐connected World

This chapter covers the evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) from different aspects. It focuses on 3GPP cellular IoT evolution for connectivity, that is, narrowband IoT (NB‐IoT). The chapter summarizes the IoT evolution from an end‐to‐end perspective, including the IoT platform, IoT protocols, connectivity, and the sensors layer. The IoT platform should support open standard protocols to communicate with different sensors, devices, and gateways from different vendors. The proposed IoT platform will support existing technologies including 2G/3G/LTE/Wi‐Fi/PLC/ Fixed and low‐power, wide‐area (LPWA) networks such as long‐range (LoRaWAN) and Sigfox as well as 3GPP standardized technologies such as LTE‐Machine‐Type Communications (MTC) and 3GPP NB‐IoT. The chapter shows link budgets for NB‐IoT with different subcarrier spacing. One machine‐to‐machine (M2M) is a global partnership developing standards for M2M communications, enabling large‐scale implementation of the IoT. The chapter addresses a high‐level architecture reference model, network elements, and reference point for cellular IoT (CIoT).