# IoT's Tiny Steps towards 5G: Telco's Perspective
## 2 Research Approach and Design
### Activity-Based Classification of IoT Applications  
The aforementioned issues motivated us to propose a new approach to the classification of IoT applications. This approach is based on \"**the activity**\", which primarily characterizes specific IoT application. In this sense, the activities are defined as new classification criteria, which denote a main function/purpose of specific IoT application observed from telco's point of view. Telecom operators observe the technical challenges of IoT through systems, tools, devices, and platforms because their availability and integration complexity determines the opportunity to capture a share of the value that is generated by IoT implementation. Based on the literature review, it was found that the most commonly mentioned terms in this sense were related to: (1) ticketing system [201]; (2) monitoring: devices [199; 201; 202; 203; 204]/services [199; 201; 202; 205; 206]/tools [207]/systems [11; 12; 199; 201; 205; 206; 208; 209; 201]/data [95; 201]/framework [12; 201]/solutions [20; 205]/networks [211]/process [7]/activity [203; 204; 207]/(3) tracking technologies [4]/devices [204]/systems [204]/applications [11; 210]/system [201]/services [202; 205]; (4) managing/controlling applications [15; 210; 212]/operation [211]/services [4; 208]/tools [208; 211]/devices [204]/system [95; 198; 204; 210]/concepts [211]/solutions [95]/platforms [95; 199]. This has led us to identify four activities, i.e., ticketing, monitoring, tracking, and managing/controlling, as new classification criteria of IoT applications. According to the authors' knowledge, it was found that these activities can cover reasonably foreseeable functions/purposes of IoT in existing application domains. Using activities as classification criteria, telcos can specify IoT application performance requirements more easily, which are in that case dictated by the specific activity, not by the IoT application domain, and determine enabling technologies in the radio access part of 5G networks. In addition, our classification approach allows better service differentiation and service delivery closer to customer expectations. According to BH Telecom's experience, customers typically come up with the following service requests when it comes to IoT: (1) they need to track their products and determine products' distribution across different regions based on their own data analysis; (2) they want to monitor their products since they do not have a department for supervision and analysis; (3) they need information panels about their outlets and working time to be downloaded by a scanning tab-ticket; (4) they want to manage/control their products according to market needs. This way of expressing customer needs has inspired us to propose the activity-based classification of IoT applications as it allows telcos to define performance requirements more precisely, and thereby improve the customer experience. The activity-based classification of IoT applications is presented in Table 3. Each activity is associated with the application domain where that activity may be applied. The requirements of identified activities and associated application domains are then mapped to 5G service classes in order to be further able to identify their performance requirements and enabling technologies necessary to meet them. For example, according to Table 3, the managing/controlling activity can be realized in several domains, such as healthcare, food, energy, transportation and logistics. For each domain, we have identified an application example, such as remote surgery [213] in the healthcare domain, food processing facilities [96] in the food domain, energy distribution [12] in the energy domain and traffic/driving [12; 213] in the transportation and logistics domain. According to diverse performance requirements of these IoT applications [214], managing/controlling activity in healthcare, food, transportation, and logistic domains can be associated with the uMTC service class, while the energy domain can be mapped to the mMTC service class.