IoT, Cloud Services, and Big Data: A Comprehensive Pricing Solution

This paper shows a proposal for pricing cloud services tailored to IoT applications that generate big data. The basic assumption of our analysis is that the emerging IoT applications do not simply make use of the information collected by few sensors. The expected volume of information generated by sensors, the different nature of sensors, the different information delivery techniques, and the variable nature of applications make the system management a real 3V big data problem. In this paper we identify the key feature that characterizes a cloud-based, sensing-as-a-service IoT application, map each feature into a specific cost function, and suitably combine these cost functions. This way, we obtain a pricing strategy sufficiently simple to be applied in operation, dependent on all the identified features, and flexible enough for being updated for any new introduced IoT service in the cloud infrastructure.