Open Radio Access Networks for Smart IoT Systems: State of Art and Future Directions

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) constitutes a vast network comprising various components such as physical devices, vehicles, buildings, and other items equipped with sensors, actuators, and software. These components are interconnected, facilitating the collection and exchange of copious data across networked communications. IoT empowers extensive monitoring and control over a myriad of objects, enabling them to gather and disseminate data that bolster applications, thereby enhancing the system’s capacity for informed decision making, environmental surveillance, and autonomous inter-object interaction, all without the need for direct human involvement. These systems have achieved seamless connectivity requirements using the next-generation wireless network infrastructures (5G, 6G, etc.), while their diverse reliability and quality of service (QoS) requirements across various domains require more efficient solutions. Open RAN (O-RAN), i.e., open radio open access network (RAN), promotes flexibility and intelligence in the next-generation RAN. This article reviews the applications of O-RAN in supporting the next-generation smart world IoT systems by conducting a thorough survey. We propose a generic problem space, which consists of (i) IoT Systems: transportation, industry, healthcare, and energy; (ii) targets: reliable communication, real-time analytics, fault tolerance, interoperability, and integration; and (iii) artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML): reinforcement learning (RL), deep neural networks (DNNs), etc. Furthermore, we outline future research directions concerning robust and scalable solutions, interoperability and standardization, privacy, and security. We present a taxonomy to unveil the security threats to emerge from the O-RAN-assisted IoT systems and the feasible directions to move this research forward.