What Does I(o)T Cost?

Abstract

Though in recent years cloud-based solutions already started to dominate the Internet of Services, with the appearance of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, more complex systems have been formed that still need a significant amount of research. The large amount of data produced by these devices requires cloud services to be efficiently processed and meaningfully visualized. In this paper, we perform cost-based investigations of two popular IoT application groups to help users to better understand IoT cloud ecosystems. We also compare existing IoT cloud providers by estimating on-demand service costs considering different circumstances, e.g. diverse messages sizes, the number of messages, the frequency of message sending and different virtual machine or application service configurations. We also implemented the defined scenarios with the IBM Bluemix IoT Platform and measure the exact data usage and prices.