# IoT's Tiny Steps towards 5G: Telco's Perspective
## 5 IoT in 5G Enabling Technologies
Due to the envisioned 5G applicability, these standards have defined an air interface that can significantly improve the performance, and network architectures that allow the deployment and coexistence of various 5G technologies. A detailed discussion of these technologies regarding both technological and standardization aspects indicates that 5G can be perceived as the main driving force for enabling the vision of a truly global IoT [219]. In this sense, the technologies described in this section will allow 5G networks to form a unified communication infrastructure for the realization of a wide range of IoT applications. These technologies  
Figure 4: IoT performance requirements and enabling technologies. will bring performance enhancement which will trigger a complete revolution in almost all spheres of human life creating a new \"everything connected\" era. Future 5G networks in such an era will face a serious problem regarding a huge number of different service types [220]. To meet the diverse requirements for a huge number of IoT applications, 5G introduces the concept of network slicing to offer programmable network instances [220]. Using network slicing, multiple independent and dedicated network instances can be created within the same infrastructure to run services that have completely different requirements for latency, reliability, throughput, and mobility [220]. This technology primarily targets a portion of the 5G core network, but also indicates that 5G radio access network (RAN) functionalities can be different for each network slice [221]. To deploy network slices, network functions need to be enabled on an on-demand basis, which has driven the use of virtualization and softwarization in 5G core network [221]. Network function virtualization (NFV) is a paradigm that enables that 5G network functions to run in a virtual environment instead of dedicated hardware [221]. The software define networking (SDN) paradigm facilitates isolation of network slices avoiding the traffic of one slice affecting the performance of another slice [221]. These two paradigms make the network much more dynamic, agile, on-demand, and flexible [222; 223]. Since the aforementioned technologies are used to deal with a variety of 5G applications, they will not be further discussed. This paper will focus on technologies used to meet performance requirements for specific applications (inter slice performance) which are implemented in the radio access part of 5G networks. These technologies are briefly described and discussed in terms of their advantages, disadvantages, and research gaps. Given the fact that the realization of particular technology affects multiple performance requirements, tiny steps towards its implementation will allow telos to deploy 5G networks, and thereby provide a performance improvement in terms of more capacity, lower latency, more mobility, more position accuracy, increased reliability, and availability [6; 224; 214]. In other words, 5G networks will accommodate many more users and devices while delivering more data [113; 114] to each user requiring high data rates [108] in a more energy-efficient way [115; 116]. Table 5 summarizes considered radio technologies used to implement future 5G networks being capable of achieving performance requirements identified in Section 4. On the basis of the literature review, one may conclude that the 5G radio access network is crowded with multiple technologies, and there seems to be a duplication of technologies, all eager to grab telco's attention and convince them to buy into the particular choice. As Table 5 shows, multiple technologies and techniques can be used to meet each performance requirement. Since the mMTC activity-based IoT classes are more mature, we have primarily focused on technologies used to fulfil their high performance requirements (i.e., connection density, positioning, and coverage). We have selected 5G enabling technologies considered from telco's perspective as the most representative and promising candidates to meet these requirements.