Towards Pricing for Sensor-Cloud

Motivated by complementing the ubiquitous wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and powerful cloud computing (CC), a lot of attention from both industry and academia has been drawn to Sensor-Cloud (SC). However, SC pricing is barely investigated. Towards pricing for SC, this paper 1) introduces five SC Pricing Models (SCPMs) first. Specifically, to charge a SC user, each SCPM considers one of the following factors respectively: i) the lease period of the SC user; ii) the required working time of SC; iii) the SC resources utilized by the SC user; iv) the volume of sensory data obtained by the SC user; v) the SC path that transmits sensory data from the WSN to the SC user. Further, this paper 2) performs analysis to discuss and exhibit the characteristics of the proposed SCPMs. With that, this paper 3) presents the case studies regarding the application of SCPMs. Eventually, this paper 4) conducts a review about the user behavior study. This paper aims to serve as a very favorable guidance for future research about pricing in SC.