Connected cars will account for one in five passenger vehicles by 2019, according to analyst firm Juniper Research.

The company is forecasting the telematics sector will continue to outperform all other M2M (machine to machine) markets over the next five years, in revenue terms, with connected cars accounting for 20 per cent of the global car industry by 2019.

The company said this new M2M market will generate revenue of more than $40 billion by 2019, doubling the size of today’s market.

According to the research, the United States is leading the way when it comes to the M2M market, with big data playing a leading role in shaping future products. However, China is becoming increasingly important as initiatives by the country’s major carriers begin to take shape.

As well as cars, Juniper believes smart metering is set to boom, propelled by green initiatives and governments’ ambitions to increase efficiency, but it won’t generate the kind of revenue cars will.

"Both India and China are expected to see rapid adoption of smart metering as new metering infrastructure is installed and smart cities are created," Juniper analyst Anthony Cox said.

Meanwhile, Juniper also says mobile data traffic generated by devices such as smartphones and tablets will hit almost 197,000 petabytes by 2019, which is equal to more than 10 billion Blu-ray movies.

However, the research found that only 41 per cent of the data generated by these devices will be carried over cellular networks by 2019, with the majority of mobile data traffic offloaded to wifi networks.

The analysts said they expect the average amount of data traffic generated by smartphone and tablets users will double between 2015 and 2019, and that the growing adoption of 4G networks and the use of HD video will drive the increasing consumption of bandwidth-demanding media consumption by users of mobile devices.