Allocation of Resources in SAaaS Clouds Managing Thing Mashups

The sensing and actuation as-a-service is an emerging business model to make sensors, actuators and data from the Internet of Things more attainable to everyday consumer. With the increase in the number of accessible Things, mashups can be created to combine services/data from one or multiple Things with services/data from virtual Web resources. These may involve complex tasks, with high computation requirements, and for this reason cloud infrastructures are envisaged as the most appropriate solution for storage and processing. This means that cloud-based services should be prepared to manage Thing mashups. Mashup management within the cloud allows not only the optimization of resources but also the reduction of the delay associated with data travel between client applications and the cloud. In this article, an optimization model is developed for the optimal allocation of resources in clouds under the sensing and actuation as-a-service paradigm. A heuristic algorithm is also proposed to quickly solve the problem.