The highly anticipated fifth generation of wireless mobile technology is called 5G. It promises to enable innovative services and applications that require huge performance increases. Among the uses for the Internet of Things (IoT), many will require low latency, reliability, and efficient connectivity to innumerable devices that 5G technologies plan to deliver. This paper shows how mobile-IoT-federation-as-a-service (MIFaaS) contributes to the provisioning of IoT services and applications with those requirements. This is done through leveraging cooperation in a federated manner among private/public clouds (IoT cloud providers, ICPs) of IoT objects that are located at the edge of the network.
The paper presents a performance assessment of the MIFaaS paradigm in a cellular 5G environment, where both of the two new protocols for cellular communications of 5G, namely long-term evolution (LTE) and narrowband IoT (NB-IoT), are employed. The result is that the proposed solution will outperform classic approaches in terms of increased number of successfully delivered IoT services. One conclusion is that the proposed federation of ICPs increases the number of solved tasks in contrast to alternative solutions where cooperation is not used. A second conclusion is that a combination of LTE and NB-IoT is necessary in order to provide the needed data rates and low latency required to handle high-end IoT data traffic.
Readers who are planning a high-end IoT implementation should strongly consider the advice of this paper with regard to using forthcoming 5G technologies.