An Effective Sensor Cloud Control Scheme Based on a Two-Stage Game Approach

Motivated by complementing the ubiquitous sensor networks and cloud computing technique, a lot of attentions have been drawn to Sensor-Cloud (SC). The idea of SC thrives on the principle of virtualization of physical sensor nodes and has introduced the intermediate processing between physical sensor nodes and end users. This paper proposes an efficient interactive SC control scheme to provide on-demand sensing services for multiple applications. By adopting the game theory, we develop a new two-stage game model, which consists of a judicious mixture of selection and incentive algorithms. In our game model, a user can choose the most adaptable data center to execute its task, and each data center can give appropriate incentives to the participating sensors. The main merit possessed by our two-stage game approach is to shed light on the practical SC control problem while providing excellent adaptability and flexibility to satisfy the different application requirements. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to include a novel incentive algorithm in the SC system. Simulation results demonstrate that our approach can outperform existing schemes by about 5%~15% in terms of the normalized user profit, service delay, and SC system throughput. Finally, we discuss future directions for designing SC control frameworks including other issues.