Range-Price Trade-Off in Sensor-Cloud for Provisioning Sensors-as-a-Service

This work proposes an optimal pricing scheme for provisioning sensors-as-a-service (Se-aaS) for catering to applications with multi-tenancy requirements in a sensor-cloud platform. The scheme orchestrates a trade-off analysis between communication range and price in a sensor-cloud platform with range-reconfigurable nodes. The proposed scheme consists of two phases -- (a) selection of a neighbor node of a source node, and determination of optimal price for the selected neighbor node. In the first phase, a source node adjusts its communication range and selects its best possible neighbor node using selectivity factor of all the neighbor nodes. In the second phase, we design a utility function to determine the optimal price of the selected neighbor node. We use the Lagrangian function to model the proposed problem as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) and obtain the optimal solution using the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions. The existing works on pricing in sensor-cloud are deficient in considering the presence of reconfigurable communication range of sensor nodes. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed scheme performs better compared to the existing pricing schemes for sensor-cloud. In particular, the proposed scheme is capable of reducing the charged price by 10.55%, as compared to the existing pricing scheme, DOPH.