Current forecasts predict that the Industrial Internet of Things will account for about 10 billion devices by 2020. Simultaneously, unlicensed low-power wide area networks are gaining momentum due to their low cost, low power, and long range characteristics, which are suitable for many IIoT applications, in addition to the usage of unlicensed bands. In this article, a solution is proposed to seamlessly integrate LoRaWAN, an open and standardized LPWAN technology, with 4G/5G mobile networks, thus allowing mobile network operators to reutilize their current infrastructures. This proposal is transparent to LoRaWAN end devices and to the EPC, since only the LoRaWAN gateway needs to be modified. The gateway acts as an evolved Node B from the core network perspective, implementing part of the eNB protocol stack. All data packets transported over the core network are both encrypted and integrity protected, hence achieving end-toend security. As a proof of concept, this solution has been implemented and validated with an open source EPC.

Large-scale deployments of massive machine type communications involve several challenges on cellular networks. To address the challenges of massive machine-type communications, or more generally, the Internet of Things (IoT), the 3GPP has developed Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) as part of Release 13. NB-IoT is designed to provide better indoor coverage, support of a massive number of low-throughput devices, with relaxed delay requirements, and lower energy consumption. NB-IoT reuses Long Term Evolution functionality with simplifications and optimizations. Particularly for small data transmissions, NB-IoT specifies two procedures to reduce the required signaling: one of them based on the control plane and the other on the user plane (UP). In this work, we provide an overview of these procedures as well as an evaluation of their performance. The results of the energy consumption show both optimizations achieve a battery lifetime extension of more than two years for a large range in the considered cases, and up to eight years for CP with good coverage. In terms of cell capacity relative to Service Request, CP achieves gains from 26 to 224 percent, and UP ranges from 36 to 165 percent. The comparison of CP and UP optimizations yields similar results, except for some specific configurations.