Cellular, Wide-Area, and Non-Terrestrial IoT: A Survey on 5G Advances and the Road Toward 6G

The next wave of wireless technologies is proliferating in connecting things among themselves as well as to humans. In the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), billions of sensors, machines, vehicles, drones, and robots will be connected, making the world around us smarter. The IoT will encompass devices that must wirelessly communicate a diverse set of data gathered from the environment for myriad new applications. The ultimate goal is to extract insights from this data and develop solutions that improve quality of life and generate new revenue. Providing large-scale, long-lasting, reliable, and near real-time connectivity is the major challenge in enabling a smart connected world. This paper provides a…