Cellular IoT Traffic Characterization and Evolution

TL;DR

This study empirically analyzes two years of cellular IoT traffic data, revealing growth trends, industry usage diversity, and technological adoption patterns across different verticals.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive empirical analysis of cellular IoT traffic evolution and industry-specific usage patterns over an extended period.

Findings

IoT traffic per device increased three-fold over two years

Significant diversity in IoT usage among industries

Most devices follow three main daily traffic patterns

Abstract

The adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies is increasing and thus IoT is seemingly shifting from hype to reality. However, the actual use of IoT over significant timescales has not been empirically analyzed. In other words the reality remains unexplored. Furthermore, despite the variety of IoT verticals, the use of IoT across vertical industries has not been compared. This paper uses a two-year IoT dataset from a major Finnish mobile network operator to investigate different aspects of cellular IoT traffic including temporal evolution and the use of IoT devices across industries. We present a variety of novel findings. For example, our results show that IoT traffic volume per device increased three-fold over the last two years. Additionally, we illustrate diversity in IoT usage among different industries with orders of magnitude differences in traffic volume and device mobility. Though we also note that the daily traffic patterns of all devices can be clustered into only three patterns, differing mainly in the presence and timing of a peak hour. Finally, we illustrate that the share of LTE-enabled IoT devices has remained low at around 2% and 30% of IoT devices are still 2G only.