How Reliability, Latency, Massiveness, and Distributed Ledger Technology Are Transforming IoT Connectivity

The future wireless landscape, often associated with 5G, envisions three types of connectivity: enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC), and massive Machine Type Communication (mMTC). The latter two are seen as two generic types that support Internet of Things (IoT) communication, putting forward new types of requirements and research challenges, such as: protocols that operate with short packets, techniques to achieve and assess extremely high reliability, tradeoffs between massiveness and high-reliability, etc. This set of challenges is further enriched by the advent of distributed ledger technology (DLT), blockchain, and smart contracts that allow autonomous interaction among IoT devices. The consensus protocols that set the basis for blockchain systems are critically reliant on communication, but they change the traffic pattern that has been envisioned for pre-blockchain IoT communication systems. This talk will give a perspective on the communication engineering challenges related to the emerging systems for IoT connectivity, elaborate on the fundamental tradeoffs, and outline methods and architectures to solve them.