QoS Based Contract Design for Profit Maximization in IoT-Enabled Data Markets

The massive deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, including sensors and actuators, is ushering in smart and connected communities of the future. The massive deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, including sensors and actuators, is ushering in smart and connected communities of the future. The availability of real-time and high-quality sensor data is crucial for various IoT applications, particularly in healthcare, energy, transportation, etc. However, data collection may have to be outsourced to external service providers (SPs) due to cost considerations or lack of specialized equipment. Hence, the data market plays a critical role in such scenarios where SPs have different quality levels of available data, and IoT users have different application-specific data needs. The pairing between data available to the SP and users in the data market requires an effective mechanism design that considers the SPs' profitability and the quality-of-service (QoS) needs of the users. We develop a generic framework to analyze and enable such interactions efficiently, leveraging tools from contract theory and mechanism design theory. It can enable and empower emerging data sharing paradigms such as Sensing-as-a-Service (SaaS). The contract design creates a pricing structure for on-demand sensing data for IoT users. By considering a continuum of user types, we capture a diverse range of application requirements and propose optimal pricing and allocation rules that ensure QoS provisioning and maximum profitability for the SP. Furthermore, we provide analytical solutions for fixed distributions of user types to analyze the developed approach. For comparison, we consider the benchmark case assuming complete information of the user types and obtain optimal contract solutions. Finally, a case study is presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed contract design framework.
Comment: This paper has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Internet of Things Journal