The number of cellular M2M connections will reach 1.3 billion by 2022, registering 220 percent growth from an estimated 400 million in 2017.

Emerging cellular networks, including NB-IoT, LTE-M and 5G, will grow to account for just under 10 percent of all cellular M2M connections by 2022. Mobile operators are now racing to provide the underlying connectivity for the future high growth of connections, spurred on by the enabled emerging use cases.

Sectors — smart cities with 66 percent CAGR, agriculture with 37 percent CAGR and smart meters with 34 percent CAGR will witness the highest growth rates in terms of cellular M2M connections over the next 4 years.

Smart city development will benefit from LPWA access technologies. Over 25 percent of cellular smart city devices and applications will operate over LPWA networks by 2022. The low cost per connection of LPWA networks and a battery life of 10 years will become appealing for monitoring city operations including transport and public energy infrastructure.

Services such as traffic information and citizen gateways will generate over 160 Petabytes of data traffic per annum in 2022. In comparison, connected cars will generate over 7,000 Petabytes of data.

The report said transforming network architecture would become key to delivering better smart city services.

Research author Sam Barker said: “Edge computing will provide the necessary network capabilities for the provision of services. Decentralising network functions by moving them to the edge will facilitate the ultra-low latency and faster processing power needed.”