The Leading 5G IoT Use Cases

The 5G wireless standard delivers a synthesizing connectivity framework that conveys immense enhancements to today’s mobile broadband services. Mostly the unreported vision of 5G is that it allows IoT devices to function on lower power for much longer time.

IoT Analytics recent study on 5G presents various IoT use cases and estimates these use cases will consider for 76M 5G connections by 2025. On the other hand, there’s lots of buzz about what 5G will mean for automation, edge computing and other digital transformation technology initiatives –particularly around Internet of Things (IoT).

What is 5G?

5G is the fifth generation of mobile communication technology and the first that is especially planned for various IoT use cases which comes up with a challenging requirements, including gigabit data rates, ultra-high network accuracy, millisecond latencies and huge connection density. 5G will also have the capability to connect a lot more devices at once, which has given the explosion to the IoT devices that need to be connected to a huge network.

In the survey done in May 2018, Gartner examined a wide spectrum of organizations from corporations to government entities and found a huge planned to deploy near about 66% 5G solutions by the end of the 2020: So what are the most promising 5G IoT use cases ? 

5G IoT Use cases #1: Improved Industrial Internet of Things Communication.

According to Gartner, 57% of enterprises state that 5G will drive Internet of Things communication and they aimed to acquire it within their organization. 5G communications can create better connectivity among different IoT gadgets. 5G structures paired with machine learning algorithms as well as big data analytics will allow better control of a lot of processes that are executed manually today. Various profitable use cases as a result of this are as follows:

Wireless industrial control : 5G will allow wireless industrial access in new areas that have been previously isolated due to limits in latency needed for smooth operations. Connected assembly line can be generated with non-hardwired, whereas mobile robots are also working along with human teams.

Smart factories : Generating interconnected, well organized and semi-automatic smart factories is impossible without strong communications architecture in place. IoT devices, robots and human personnel should be capable to interchange data to cooperate effectively. With the arrival of 5G, those gadgets will no longer require to be wired to get access to a low-latency, high-capacity network, high-speed.

Wearable technology communication : Smart glasses, helmets and other wearables are mostly now available on the manufacturing floors. With 5G mobile data, the wearables become able to deliver seamless service flow while being away from the phone range. 5G also increases the speed of storage delivering, which means that smart gadgets are ready to move from being companion devices to robust standalone gadgets.

5G IoT Use cases #2: Vehicle Telematics

Automotive & Transportation is assumed to be the no.1 sector for adoption of 5G technologies in IoT applications. By 2022, 100% of new vehicles delivered by OEMs will come equipped with smart telematics applications such as vehicle diagnostics, location tracking and other connectivity systems. These applications mostly contain the transmission of small volumes of transient data gathered from the vehicles and today they are mostly placed over conventional cellular (2G/3G/4G) technologies that in general provide an adequate performance to manage their current communication needs.

However, the launch of 5G provides the possibility to assemble more granular data in real-time about the health and performance of the vehicle as well as the drivers’ behavior and results in various new technological innovations and business models containing fleet management solutions, remote diagnostics and OTA updates, predictive maintenance, usage-based auto insurance, etc. The appearing 5G network features will enable fleet managers to connect even more devices and assure truly real-time connectivity and remote control all over assets.

In-Vehicle infotainment includes the delivery of information and entertainment services to the drivers and passengers, such as updates on the current traffic situation or weather forecasts, but also more data-rigorous video and music streaming. Compared to its huge alternatives (LTE), 5G connectivity has the ability to enhance these applications and assemble new ones, such as in-car retail or even AR/VR-based navigation systems and entertainment services.

5G IoT Use cases #3: Smart Grid Automation

The universal demand for electricity is growing at a great pace. To control the demand, new technological solutions such as smart grids and virtual power plants have appeared. In the energy & utilities sector, 5G’s improved abilities make the technology specifically suited to the real-time management and automation of the smart electricity grid. These solutions are pointed towards the optimizing operations and maintenance by rapidly detecting and responding to faults along the grid, but also completing the severe demands on their grid, driven by trends such as the inclusion of Distributed Energy Resources (DER) like renewables into the power grid.

However, as utility operators update their grids to progressively automate operations with new sensors, control system and integrate renewable energy sources, 5G is assumed to be largely adopted because of its higher deployment flexibility and lower cost as compared to wired alternatives, while offering an analogous performance.

5G IoT Use cases #4: Mobile and Collaborative Robots

In the industrial sector, there is an usual consensus that 5G is most appropriate for connecting industrial robots with several degrees of mobility, from static collaborative robots to completely mobile robots such as autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs). These robots have several sensors for situational awareness while technological advances are making them more intelligent and able to autonomously execute several tasks, such as moving goods or carrying out repairs, etc. As a result, they need to process a huge amount of data. However, accommodating sufficient processing abilities into these robots can be very challenging and costly, mainly for smaller robots. 5G can help to resolve these issues and thanks to its low latency and high reliability, which will make it simpler to unload part of this processing to edge or cloud-based servers and thus reduce the hardware complexity as well as cost of the robots.

5G IoT Use cases #5: Video Surveillance

Video surveillance is another application that is assumed to succeed with 5G connectivity. Because of the increasing threats to public safety in recent years, many government sectors and cities around the world are investing in public surveillance and security systems and this trend is assumed to grow faster in the future.

Today, the huge amount of public video surveillance systems still depend on wired connectivity, but the acquisition of wireless communications such as Wi-Fi or cellular is getting popularity due to an easier and quicker set-up and generally lower cost as compared to wired networks which equals to meaningful ROI for organizations. While LTE networks gives a satisfactory level of performance for remote access to live and recorded HD video, the adoption of 5G will allow the performance boost required for more advanced video content analytics in real-time and the deployment of huge numbers of cameras.

5G IoT Use cases #6: Cooperative Intelligent Ability to move

The largest influence that 5G is assumed to have for the new peer-to-peer wireless technology ( V2X ) is to allow the sharing of real-time information about traffic and road conditions among cars and other road users. These new cooperative intelligent mobility and driver assistance services are for both private as well as for public transportation. This needs to formulate a 5G-based V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything) architecture which is made up of roadside sensors and V2X base station, in addition to 5G communication devices into vehicles and other road users (e.g. cyclists, pedestrians etc.).

By monitoring real-time traffic data accumulated from the roadside infrastructure and the vehicles on the road, such Intelligent Transportation Systems would be capable to timely inform drivers about uncertain road conditions, traffic blocks and imminent safety-critical situations ahead, which will improve road safety and traffic efficiency.

5G will also convey a greater state of connectivity to all the distributed sensors involving in the smart city ecosystem and allow rapid data exchanges between them, carrying more technical solutions into existence.

5G technology is so new and developing that will allow everyone to realize the power of IoT technology and will definitely change the entire landscape considerably. Once everything is connected through 5G, its use case opportunities will improve enormously as new services and applications are going to emerge out.