Dynamic Provisioning of Emerging Multifunction/Multi-Bearer Smart IoT Devices

Multifunction/multi-bearer (MB) smart IoT devices are expected to play a critical role in the emerging IoT market and constitute a significant portion of smart IoT devices. This paper presents a detailed realistic performance analysis and feasibility assessment of commercial 4G LTE systems when used to support a massive number of multifunction IoT devices, where each device is running few IoT applications including at least one mission-critical application with stringent latency requirements. The simulation results indicate that current commercial 4G LTE can effectively support massive number of both single bearer and MB smart IoT devices, provided that these devices are only running IoT applications with relaxed latency requirements of at least 100 ms. Current commercial 4G LTE systems can only support a limited number of MB IoT devices running mission-critical IoT applications with strict latency requirements of less than 50 ms.