IoT, big data, and cloud computing value chain: pricing issues and solutions

This paper shows a proposal for making the price of cloud services clear and subject to optimization. The proposal is tailored to Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications based on big data management. 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 5-V big data problem. In this paper, we identify the key features that characterize a cloud-based, sensing-as-a-service IoT application, we map each feature into a specific cost function, and we suitably combine these cost functions. This way, we obtain a pricing strategy sufficiently simple for it to be applied in operation, depending on all the identified features, and flexible enough for being updated for any new introduced IoT service in the cloud infrastructure.