The Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming more and more popular, which suggests that it is moving from a marketing gimmick to a practical use. Conversely, no empirical analysis has been done on the real-world application of IoT over long periods of time. To put it another way, the reality is still undiscovered. Moreover, there has been no comparison of IoT adoption across vertical industries, despite the diversity of IoT verticals. This article investigates many elements of cellular IoT traffic, such as temporal evolution and the use of IoT devices across businesses, using a two-year IoT dataset from a major Finnish mobile network operator. We provide a range of new discoveries. For instance, our findings indicate that during the previous two years, the volume of IoT traffic per device surged thrice. We also show the diversity of IoT usage across industries with orders of magnitude variances in device mobility and traffic volume. However, we also see that there are only three patterns that can be distinguished from one another based primarily on the existence and timing of peak hours in the daily traffic patterns of all devices. Lastly, we show that just about 2% of IoT devices are LTE-enabled, and that 30% of IoT devices are still only 2G capable.

IoT, M2M, Empirical Measurements, Cellular Network