PRIME: An Optimal Pricing Scheme for Mobile Sensors-as-a-Service

In this article, we propose a pricing scheme, named PRIME, for provisioning
mobile Sensors-as-a-Service
(
mSe-aaS
) in the mobile sensor-cloud (MSC) architecture, with an aim to optimally distribute the financial profit among different actors of MSC. Unlike traditional sensor-cloud, MSC introduces a new actor as device owner, whose mobile device hosts the physical sensor nodes. On the other hand, the device and sensor owners earn certain revenues, based on the usage of the sensor nodes and the mobile devices, for provisioning mSe-aaS to the end-users. MSC is a contemporary architecture, and therefore, no pricing scheme exists for it. In this work, we consider the presence of the device owner, sensor owner, Sensor-Cloud Service Provider (SCSP), and end-user to determine an optimal pricing strategy. In order to design such a strategy, we use the
Lagrangian multiplier
method and apply
Karush-Kuhn-Tucker
(
KKT
) conditions. On the other hand, an end-user has multiple options to select an SCSP among the available ones. Therefore, based on the reputation of all the available SCSPs, PRIME enables an end-user to select a suitable one. Extensive experimental results report that PRIME increases the profit of sensor and device owners by 25.67% and 29.12%, respectively. We also compare PRIME with an existing pricing scheme for traditional sensor-cloud architecture. We notice that the service return using PRIME increases by 55.31% as compared to the same using the traditional sensor-cloud architecture.