# Building Fire Evacuation: An IoT-Aided Perspective in the 5G Era
## 7 Concluding Remarks  
From the tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire, we can see room for improving the current emergency response and building fire evacuation, with the ongoing trend that all engineering fields are actively improving their efficiency and effectiveness with the aid of IoT-based systems. As one of the important aspects of building and fire safety, building fire evacuation should also not fall behind this progress. The IoT-aided building fire evacuation is a new concept of building evacuation mode which enhances the building fire evacuation, including the elevator evacuation process, by making the most appropriate evacuation strategies based on the real-time fire-ground information, such as fire environment and occupants' situations. With the maturity of IoT technologies and the appearance of more IoT application scenarios in the 5G era, the IoT-aided building fire evacuation will no longerbe only a concept. It has great potential to be used in practice and play more important roles in future emergency response. Therefore, by focusing on IoT applications in building fire evacuation, this paper investigated the advantages and insufficiencies of current smart building fire evacuation systems. After that, a preliminary design of an IoT-aided building fire evacuation control system was proposed. The proposed IoT system was designed in the sequence of information needs, information sources and data transmission, and potential services and applications, which corresponds to the architecture of an IoT system. In addition, the advantages of the proposed system were also concluded. The proposed system could enable (1) monitoring of the fire environment and occupants' situations in buildings; (2) 3D-visualization of the building information; and (3) system-level-based evacuation strategy planning. With the help of the proposed IoT system, safe and more efficient building fire evacuation will surely be enabled.  
The 5G era will be characterized as the age of boundless connectivity for all and intelligent automation, which enriches people's lives and improves the efficiency of all engineering fields. In building fire evacuation, 5G combined with IoT, BIM, and various data analytics technologies also presents vast amounts of possibilities and opportunities to overcome the challenges ahead of information perception, data management, and intelligent decision making. The wonderful things that 5G brings to building fire evacuation are not only allowing for more IoT use cases to transmit their data in a wireless approach, but also bring various communication services with different performance requirements, whether they are massive machine type communications, bandwidth-hungry applications (e.g., HD video streaming, AR applications), or critical emergency using scenarios, so that information needs related to indoor environments, states of various building facilities, and occupants' status can be systematically integrated and freely worked together in actual fire emergency scenes. However, to deploy such a system in practice, there may still be difficulties. Aspects include system reliability, legislation control, and acceptance of the public, which still need to be improved. Only in this way can IoT-aided building fire evacuation truly fulfill its functions in the 5G era.  
The following are categorizations of individual contributions to this paper: conceptualization of research idea, H.F.; research methodology, H.F.; writing--original draft preparation, H.F.; writing--review and editing, S.L. and J.T.Y.L.; supervision, S.L.; funding acquisition, S.L. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
This research was funded by the grants No. 7005046 and No. CityU 11217319.  
The authors gratefully acknowledge the grants Nos. 7005046 and CityU 11217319 for supporting this research.  
The authors declare no conflict of interest.