## 1 Introduction  
Internet of Things (IoT) networks have been transforming the cyber-physical landscape during the past few years as they enable the interconnection of physical devices, such as sensors, machines, appliances, vehicles, etc., to the internet, allowing these objects to collect, exchange, and act on data [1]. The key features of IoT networks is that they allow a multitude of new features on physical devices, including (a) automation and intelligent decision making [2], (b) real-time monitoring and control [3], (c) efficiency and cost reduction [2], (d) smart cities and infrastructure [4], (e) healthcare transformation [5], (f) industrial IoT [5], (g) environmental monitoring and sustainability [4], and (h) security and safety enhancements [5, 6, 7]  
The traditional architecture for interconnecting IoT systems usually utilizes the existing network infrastructure (e.g., Wi-Fi or Ethernet), or alternatively relies on a dedicated wireless network [8], such as ZigBee [9], Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) [10], z-Wave [11], LoRaWAN [12, 13], and many others. These technologies have the advantage of relying on unlicensed radio frequencies, and therefore can be used without a subscription for each device. Additionally, the dedicated wireless networks have been designed specifically for IoT applications, and have benefits in terms of energy efficiency compared with Wi-Fi. On the other hand, they require a gateway to facilitate the communication between the wireless network and the rest of the infrastructure, thus having increased installation complexity compared with Wi-Fi devices. At the same time, as the cost of cellular networks keeps decreasing, and the bandwidth keeps increasing, the 5G and beyond network seems an increasingly attractive alternative [14; 15; 16]. The advantages of the 5G network include (a) high data rates and bandwidth [17], which may be orders of magnitudes larger than some other technologies, (b) ultra-low latency [18], which can be as low as 1 ms, (c) massive scalability [17], allowing for the system to increase the number of sensors without costly infrastructure updates, (d) mobility support [19], since the networks are inherently mobile, (e) network slicing and QoS [20], allowing for multiple operators and/or applications to share the same infrastructure, (f) Integrated Edge Computing [21; 22], allowing for computation very near to the source of the data streams, and g) enhanced security and reliability [23]. This paper focuses on exploring the suitability of the 5G network for an environmental monitoring system, using off-the-shelf equipment and technologies. The implementation and deployment consists of an IoT sensor monitoring system that includes hardware parts such as ESP32 [24] and Raspberry Pi [25] using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) [26] and wireless networks for real-time transformation of real-time data. All of the above is implemented by optimizing data processing at the edge, ensuring reliable cloud connectivity for scalability and efficiency, and reducing any network congestion. The motivation for this research stems from the need to leverage 5G networking technology to enhance IoT sensor monitoring systems; thus, the implementation of a system that utilizes 5G to achieve real-time data collection and monitoring, overcoming limitations of traditional sensor network deployments, is investigated. By focusing on optimizing data processing at the edge, ensuring reliable cloud connectivity, and reducing network congestion, this research aims to provide a valuable contribution to the development of next-generation IoT-based wireless communication systems [27; 28]. The research problem is the following: what is the energy efficiency and latency of an IoT system that relies on 5G networking instead of traditional architectures? In order to answer this question, we have designed and implemented a sensing architecture that consists of an ESP32 microcontroller, with a sensor, a Raspberry Pi, and a 5G module.