Towards Massive Connectivity of Wireless IoT in Evolving 5G Cellular Network and Beyond

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The Internet of Things (IoT) is emerging as the next stage of the information revolution. It has the potential to transform the world as it is capable of revolutionizing our lives through manifold applications e.g., smart homes, smart cities, positioning, security, tracking, vehicular connectivity, and e-health. According to a recent forecast, International Data Corporation (IDC) expects 212 billion connected “things” globally by the end of 2020. A recent report from ABI research predicts that 75 percent of the growth in wireless connections between today and the end of the decade will come from sensor nodes and accessories. ******The IoT devices are usually a wide range of low-power, low-cost, software-enabled devices and IoT application scenarios range from low-band-width delay-tolerant to high-band-width delay-sensitive applications. Such a diverse situation will obviously lead to various challenging scalability, heterogeneity and quality-of-service (QoS) issues. Energy efficiency of the communication networks is also becoming more and more critical since the global power consumption, its costs, and environmental effects will increase proportionally, if not exponentially, along with the traffic growth. Some IoT devices may not be powered by traditional power sources rather can rely on energy harvesting to prolong their lifetime. To ensure seamless connectivity and radical flexibility of diverse IoT devices in dense traffic load scenarios, drone-assisted communication may also be considered within the existing multi-tier architecture.******In recent years, research and development in designing next generation cellular network architectures are making progress to support wireless IoT. Other research and development have focused on “application and above” network layer issues. However, in an end-to-end system, these may not be enough to accomplish the full potential of IoT. Consequently, we need to be proactive in order to address physical and medium access layer design issues, tailored to the specific nature of IoT communications. ******The long-term objective of our research program is to develop novel technologies that can provide seamless coverage of massive IoT devices in 5G cellular network and beyond. In aiming for massive connectivity of wireless IoT devices, the approach of my research program is to design innovative techniques in the communication protocol stack. The long-term objective of our research program will be achieved through the following short-term objectives: Development of radio resource management algorithms for massive connectivity, and Energy-efficient and low-complex transmitter/receiver pair.**