The IoT paradigm holds the promise to revolutionize the way we live and work by means of a wealth of new services, based on seamless interactions between a large amount of heterogeneous devices. After decades of conceptual inception of the IoT, in recent years a large variety of communication technologies has gradually emerged, reflecting a large diversity of application domains and of communication requirements. Such heterogeneity and fragmentation of the connectivity landscape is currently hampering the full realization of the IoT vision, by posing several complex integration challenges. In this context, the advent of 5G cellular systems, with the availability of a connectivity technology, which is at once truly ubiquitous, reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient, is considered as a potentially key driver for the yet-to emerge global IoT. In the present paper, we analyze in detail the potential of 5G technologies for the IoT, by considering both the technological and standardization aspects. We review the present-day IoT connectivity landscape, as well as the main 5G enablers for the IoT. Last but not least, we illustrate the massive business shifts that a tight link between IoT and 5G may cause in the operator and vendors ecosystem.

Traditionally, energy efficiency aspects have been included in the wireless access network design space only in the context of power control aimed at interference mitigation and for the increase of the terminal battery lifetime. Energy consumption of network components has also, for a long time, not been considered an issue, neither in equipment design nor in network planning and management. However, in recent years, with the user demand increasing at nearly exponential pace and margins rapidly shrinking, concerns about energy efficiency have been raised, with the objective of reducing network operational costs (not to mention the environmental issues). Installing more energy-efficient hardware does not seem to fully solve the problem, since wireless access networks are almost invariably (over)provisioned with respect to the peak user demand. This means that efficient resource management schemes, which are capable of controlling how much of the network infrastructure is actually needed and which parts can be temporarily powered off to save energy, can be extremely effective and provide quite large cost reductions. Considering that most of the energy in wireless access networks is consumed in the radio part, dynamic provisioning of wireless access network resources is crucial to achieving energy-efficient operation. The consensus on this approach in the research community has been wide in the last few years, and a large number of solutions have been proposed. In this paper, we survey the most important proposals, considering the two most common wireless access technologies, namely, cellular and WLAN. The main features of the proposed solutions are analyzed and compared, with an outlook on their applicability in typical network scenarios that also include cooperation between both access technologies. Moreover, we provide an overview of the practical implementation aspects that must be addressed to achieve truly energy-efficient wireless access networks, including current standardization work, and trends in the development of energy-efficient hardware.

The recently approved Energy Efficient Ethernet standard IEEE 802.3az achieves energy savings by using a low power mode when the link is idle. However, those savings heavily depend on the traffic patterns, due to the overhead inherent in transitions between active and low power modes. This makes it impractical to estimate energy savings through measurements or simulations in all relevant scenarios. In this letter we present an analytical model to estimate the energy consumption of an Energy Efficient Ethernet link, based on simple traffic parameters. The model is validated through simulation and experimental data.

The integration of different protocols and technologies remain to date one of the main challenges in IoT. The lack of widely accepted standards at the application layer, and the wide deployment basis of a large number of legacy (e.g. Non-IP) technologies further exacerbate this issue. To date, typically integration is solved with ad hoc solutions on a per-connection basis ("N-to-N"). Such approach does not scale, being suitable only for small scenarios with a limited heterogeneity of technologies. More scalable approaches have been proposed, message-based, and built around a publish-subscribe architecture. In this work we summarize an experimental evaluation of such integration approach, based on the implementation of a Smart Office use case. We describe in detail the main integration issues arisen, and how they have been addressed. Our work shows how to integrate in practice in an efficient and scalable manner highly heterogeneous IoT scenarios.