Abstract
The Internet of things (IoT) is the third evolution of the traditional Internet that enables interaction and communication among machines. Many IoT platforms and networks have been developed, and recently, market sectors have started to develop specific IoT applications and services. Integrating heterogeneous IoT networks with the existing ones, mainly with the cellular networks, is a great demand. IoT represents one of the main use cases of the fifth-generation (5G) cellular system as announced by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Integrating IoT networks with 5G networks face many challenges related to dense deployment and a massive number of expected connected devices. Thus, IoT network availability and scalability are the main requirements that should be achieved. To this end, this work provides a framework for integrating heterogeneous IoT networks with the 5G networks. The proposed system considers dense deployment and system scalability and availability requirements as announced by ITU and 3GPP. Our proposed structure deploys three main communication paradigms; mobile edge computing (MEC), device-to-device communications (D2D), and software-defined networking (SDN). Our proposed system is evaluated over a reliable environment for various deployment scenarios, and the results validate the proposed structure. The proposed IoT/5G reduces the percentage of blocked tasks by an average of 30% than other traditional IoT networks. This increases the overall system availability and scalability since IoT networks can have more devices and tasks than existing IoT networks. Furthermore, our proposed structure reduces the overall consumed energy by an average of 20% than existing IoT networks, which is an effective metric for IoT networks.