Achieving Scalability in the 5G-Enabled Internet of Things

The Internet of Things has been emerging as the most important IT applications in recent years. According to the estimate by Gartner, Inc., there will be 20 billion IoT devices connected to the Internet in 2020. These huge number of IoT devices will produce enormous Big Data for IoT platforms to process. As a result, the scalability of IoT platforms has become one of the most urging issues. With the development of upcoming 5G technologies, we see some very useful tools that can be applied to tackle the IoT scalability problems. Notably, Cloud computing, Fog computing, SDN technologies in 5G can work together to enable the scalability of the IoT system. This chapter will elaborate these scalability enablers in 5G and how they can be applied to provide the system scalability urgently required by the IoT platforms. The discussion will include IoT scalability by Cloud, by Fog and by Network Slicing of SDN.