ServEx: Service Exchange Among Multiple SCSPs in Sensor-Cloud for IoT Applications

Abstract

This paper introduces a scheme for autonomous service exchange among multiple sensor-cloud service providers (SCSPs) in a sensor-cloud (SC) platform for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Typically, SC offers Sensors-as-a-Service (SeaaS) using the concept of sensor virtualization for serving different IoT applications seamlessly in real-time. On the other hand, an SC platform reduces the tasks of sensor deployment and management on the user by employing SCSP. In an SC platform, single SCSP may be incapable of serving an entire IoT application requested by an end-user due to the lack of sufficient sensor nodes (SNs) present in the region of interested of an application. However, the presence of multiple SCSPs in an SC platform plays a complementary role in serving an IoT application entirely by implementing the idea of service exchange among them. The proposed scheme, ServEx, enables service exchange among multiple SCSPs in an SC platform. In ServEx, we apply a 2-phase approach. In the first phase, we introduce the use of a data structure to store the service profile of end-users and SCSPs. On the other hand, in the second phase, we design a profile matching mechanism for enabling a SCSP to find desired SNs registered to other SCSPs. Through extensive experiments, we observe that ServEx reduces the average delay by 57% and the average energy consumption by 74% and increases the capability of complete service provisioning for each SCSPs.