PCAM: Optimal Pricing Scheme for Rendering Camera-Network-as-a-Service

This work proposes an optimal pricing scheme, named PCAM, for Camera-Network-as-a-Service (CNaaS) platform to characterize the complex monetary transactions among the participating actors. In CNaaS, a camera-network service provider (CNSP) delivers different applications to multiple end-users (EUs) in the form of Virtual Camera Netorks (VCNs) in exchange for usage-based service charge. On the other hand, the camera network owners (CNOs) rent camera nodes to the CNSP to create the VCNs in exchange for a rental fee. Each of these actors utilize heterogeneous resources with different procurement, deployment, and maintenance costs. Further, EUs prefer to spend minimum price while the CNOs expect to fetch maximum rents. Therefore, it is necessary to design a suitable pricing scheme to provide affordable charges to the EUs while also ensuring optimum profits for both the CNSP and the CNOs. To achieve these objectives, we design PCAM to ensure fair transactions among the actors by optimizing the price of the nodes and VCN. Extensive simulations and numerical analysis show that PCAM increases the profit of the CNSP by 77.70%, reduces the expenditure of the EUs by 33.25%, and improves average network lifetime by 84.6%, when incorporated in the traditional CNaaS architecture.