  5th generation (5G) systems have been designed with three main objectives in
mind: increasing throughput, reducing latency, and enabling reliable
communications. To meet these (often conflicting) constraints, the 3GPP
released a set of specifications for 5G NR, one of the main innovations being
the support for communications in the millimeter wave (mmWave) bands. However,
how to implement lower complexity, energy efficient, mid-market Internet of
Things (IoT) applications is still an on-going investigation, currently led by
the 3GPP which is extending the NR standard with NR-Light specifications to
support devices with reduced capabilities (REDCAP). While REDCAP devices may
also operate at mmWaves to improve the network performance, hardware/software
simplifications are needed to support balanced and mixed requirements compared
to 5G NR systems. In this context, the contributions of this paper are
threefold. First, we present some NR-Light use cases for which the support of
the mmWave bands is desirable. Second, we describe how 5G NR can be simplified
to achieve NR-Light requirements and expectations. Finally, we evaluate via
simulation the performance of NR-Light devices operating at mmWaves in an
industrial IoT setup, in terms of cost and complexity, throughput, and latency.
