IoT Communication Sharing: Scenarios, Algorithms and Implementation

Nowadays, manufacturers want to collect the data of their sold-products to the cloud, so that they can conduct analysis and improve the operation, maintenance and services of their products. Manufacturers are looking for a self-contained solution for data transmission since their products are typically deployed in a large number of different buildings, and it is neither feasible to negotiate with each building to use the building's network (e.g., WiFi) nor practical to establish its own network infrastructure. ISPs are aware of this market. Since the readily available 3G/4G is over costly for most IoT devices, ISPs are developing new choices. Nevertheless, it can be expected that the choices from ISPs will not be fine-grained enough to match hundreds or thousands of requirements on different costs and data volumes from the IoT applications. To address this problem, we for the first time propose IoT communication sharing (ICS). We first clarify the ICS scenarios. We then formulate the IoT communication sharing (ICS) problem, and develop a set of algorithms with provable performance. We further present our implementation of a fully functioning system. Our evaluations show that ICS and our algorithms can lead to a cost reduction of five times and eight times respectively for the two real-world cases.