# IoT's Tiny Steps towards 5G: Telco's Perspective
## 1 Introduction  
Telecom operators (telcos) had the most power and influence over business in the information and communication technology (ICT) industry during past decades. This dominance was the result of owning and provisioning communication infrastructures which nowadays have become more of a commodity than a luxury. Telco's revenue streams were mainly based on the provisioning of traditional services, such as voice calls and short message services (SMS). Recent work of regulatory agencies and the appearance of alternative service providers have led telecom operators to form the opinion that alternative service providers have conflicting interests and provide competitive services, thus decreasing telco's revenue from traditional services [1]. However, the latest econometric analysis presented in [2] has shown that telecom operators and alternative service providers have aligned interests and their collaboration could be favorable to both parties. The interests of alternative service providers and telcos are not inevitably conflicting, since the economic growth of the alternative service providers are positively correlated with telco revenues and vice versa. The development of a digital society has changed the traditional value chain and introduced new issues for telcos as they seek a way how to monetize new digital services [3]. These servicesare diversified across various domains of industry, such as agriculture, construction, utilities, transportation, healthcare, finance, etc., and delivered to customers through connected devices building thereby the concept of Internet of Things (IoT). IoT can be defined as an interconnected network of things/objects that are able to interact with each other and cooperate with other things/objects through wireless and wired connections in order to create new services/applications for the benefit of society. In this way, IoT brings almost limitless benefit's, which have the potential to radically change our daily life by saving time and resources while creating possibilities for growth and innovation [4]. IoT has disruptive potential in almost every application domain, which has created many challenges that need to be faced when implementing IoT-based solutions, such as prevailing over obstacles generated by the fragmentation of IoT, both in terms of application domains and in terms of technologies. Therefore, recognizing all potential IoT applications while having in mind the development of technology and the requirements of individuals, businesses, and society as a whole is quite challenging. Telcos now have the opportunity to seize a share of the value that is generated by IoT implementation. The size of this share will depend on telco's role in the value chain that ranges from being a traditional provider of communication infrastructure to being an end-to-end solution provider [3]. In order to monetize IoT, telcos will have to address many challenges which can be summarized as follows: (1) strategic challenges relating to decisions on future directions; (2) business challenges relating to successful management, investment, partnerships; and (3) technical challenges relating to changing connectivity and performance requirements. This paper focuses on the technical challenges since connectivity and performance requirements of IoT objects/things cannot be fulfilled using existing cellular networks that limit numerous IoT applications. In order to overcome issues associated with the current cellular networks, new types of technologies are being introduced leading towards the fifth generation (5G) network [5; 6; 7]. The architecture of the 5G network has to seamlessly integrate the requirements of diverse IoT applications: from delay-sensitive video applications to ultra-low latency, from high-speed entertainment applications in a vehicle to mobility on demand for connected objects and from best effort applications to reliable and ultra-reliable ones for health and safety [8].