Understanding the IoT Connectivity Landscape: A Contemporary M2M Radio Technology Roadmap

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive review of M2M radio technologies for IoT, highlighting key architectures, features, and standardization efforts, with a focus on cellular LTE solutions and real-world deployment insights.

Contribution

It offers a systematic overview of existing and emerging M2M radio technologies, including practical deployment experiences and standardization developments, to unify IoT connectivity solutions.

Findings

Diverse M2M radio technologies are analyzed for IoT applications.

Real-world deployment experiences inform technology performance insights.

Standardization efforts are progressing to harmonize M2M connectivity.

Abstract

This article addresses the market-changing phenomenon of the Internet of Things (IoT), which relies on the underlying paradigm of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications to integrate a plethora of various sensors, actuators, and smart meters across a wide spectrum of businesses. The M2M landscape features today an extreme diversity of available connectivity solutions which -- due to the enormous economic promise of the IoT -- need to be harmonized across multiple industries. To this end, we comprehensively review the most prominent existing and novel M2M radio technologies, as well as share our first-hand real-world deployment experiences, with the goal to provide a unified insight into enabling M2M architectures, unique technology features, expected performance, and related standardization developments. We pay particular attention to the cellular M2M sector employing 3GPP LTE technology. This work is a systematic recollection of our many recent research, industrial, entrepreneurial, and standardization efforts within the contemporary M2M ecosystem.