Comparative Analysis of QoS Management and Technical Requirements in 3GPP Standards for Cellular IoT Technologies

Optimization of 3GPP standards that apply to cellular technologies and their adaptation to LPWAN has not led to positive results only enabling to compete on the market with the growing number non-cellular greenfield LPWAN technologies – LoRa, Sigfox and others. The need to take into consideration, during the 3GPP standard optimization phase, the low-cost segment of narrow-band IoT devices relying on such new technologies as LTE-M, NB-IoT and EC-GSM, has also led to a loss of a number of technical characteristics and functions that offered low latency and guaranteed the quality of service. The aim of this article is therefore to review some of the most technical limitations and restrictions of the new 3GPP IoT technologies, as well as to indicate the direction for development of future standards applicable to cellular IoT technologies.