# Spectrum Demand Forecasting for IoT Services
## 7 Conclusions  
In this paper, a novel spectrum forecasting methodology was proposed and implemented for IoT. The methodology is fed from a market study for calculating the strength of penetration of IoT technologies in a country's economic activity to find the density of devices, the technologies, services, frequency bands, and spectral efficiency that will exist in the future IoT scenarios. The methodology consists of five steps that should be carefully adapted to each country's IoT situation. We applied the model in Colombia. Data was collected from 2017 and forecasting was projected until 2030. The market study highlights approximately 50% of IoT penetration by 2030, an average of fewer than 5 devices per gateway by 2030, for non-cellular IoT services in places such as home/office, hospitals, roads, and rural areas and a higher number of devices deployed in urban spaces with over 50 devices per hectare in average for smart metering and lighting systems. Fourteen scenarios for spectrum contention are considered over 20 different IoT services where urban services are predominant. In consequence, the study case results in Colombia show a higher demand of spectrum for IoT services in smart cities than in other sectors such as healthcare or agriculture. In particular, non-cellular frequency bands will be highly demanded even more than cellular bands for smart city services. In addition, home/office will be highly demanded in the non-cellular mmW frequency band, mainly because of the Gbit multimedia service; but this only requires a short-range coverage. This band will likely be also occupied with wireless security cameras in the streets. Comparing spectrum demands with and without teledensity and spectral efficiency increases reveals significant spectrum savings if the increase occurs. This highlights the importance of the efforts that authorities and operators should carry out together to overcome a rising aversion to 5G and IoT technologies from the general public. The most important spectrum requirements come from multimedia or video services: video cameras in streets, Gbit Internet access in homes and offices, both should take place mainly in NC unlicensed bands. Additionally, entertainment systems for cars, due to their mobile nature, pose the largest burden in spectral efficiency terms, although the total spectrum requirement will probably depend on market factors. Sensors and M2M devices for environmental and agricultural services will not represent important spectrum demands and its allocation should not be difficult, but correctly planning for these services would guarantee its timely development with a diverse ecosystem that should bring larger benefits to the final user in a stronger, inclusive, digital society. Figure 6: Required spectrum in 2030 dis-aggregation: frequency bands and bandwidths. **Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, D.J.-R. and M.P. ; methodology, D.J.-R.; software, D.J.-R.; validation, M.P. ; formal analysis, M.P. ; investigation, M.P. ; resources, M.P. ; data curation, D.J.-R.; writing-original draft preparation, all authors; writing-review and editing, all authors; visualization, D.J.-R.; supervision, M.P. ; project administration, M.P. ; funding acquisition, M.P. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. **Funding:** This research was funded by the National Spectrum Agency of Colombia (ANE) and the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana through the research project titled \"Spectrum Forecasting Model for IoT Services in Colombia\" ID number 7778, Covenant number 056-2017. **Data Availability Statement:** The data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author. **Acknowledgments:** The authors would like to thank [PERSON] and [PERSON] for their support during the development of the research project, and their valuable suggestion in the review of this work.