AMACoT: A Marketplace Architecture for Trading Cloud of Things Resources

Cloud of Things (CoT) is increasingly viewed as a paradigm that can satisfy the diverse requirements of emerging Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The potential of CoT is not yet realized due to challenges in sharing and reusing IoT physical resources across multiple applications. The existing approaches provide small-scale and hardware-dependent shared access to IoT resources. This article considers using market mechanisms to commoditize CoT resources as the approach to enable shared access to CoT resources and to improve their reusability. In order to achieve this, the requirements for trading CoT resources are discussed to conceptualize the proposed approach. A generic description model for CoT resource is introduced to quantify the value of CoT resources. In this article, a marketplace architecture for trading CoT resources referred to as AMACoT is proposed. By formulating the trading of CoT resources as an optimization problem, the proposed approach is experimentally validated. The evaluation measures the system performance and verifies the optimization problem using three evolutionary algorithms. The evaluation of the optimization algorithms demonstrates the optimality of trading CoT resources solutions in terms of resource cost, resource utilization, provider lock-in, and provider profit.