  The Internet of Things (IoT) promises ubiquitous connectivity of everything
everywhere, which represents the biggest technology trend in the years to come.
It is expected that by 2020 over 25 billion devices will be connected to
cellular networks; far beyond the number of devices in current wireless
networks. Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications aims at providing the
communication infrastructure for enabling IoT by facilitating the billions of
multi-role devices to communicate with each other and with the underlying data
transport infrastructure without, or with little, human intervention. Providing
this infrastructure will require a dramatic shift from the current protocols
mostly designed for human-to-human (H2H) applications. This article reviews
recent 3GPP solutions for enabling massive cellular IoT and investigates the
random access strategies for M2M communications, which shows that cellular
networks must evolve to handle the new ways in which devices will connect and
communicate with the system. A massive non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)
technique is then presented as a promising solution to support a massive number
of IoT devices in cellular networks, where we also identify its practical
challenges and future research directions.
