IoT based interactive shopping ecosystem

Abstract

Internet of Things aims at integrating networked information systems to real world entities. It connects objects such as smart phones, sensors, LED(Light Emitting Diodes) displays and even clothes through the internet allowing them to interact and exchange information among themselves. In today's times IoT has found its application in practically every walk of life and inventory management is no exception. At present, inventory management is becoming increasingly complex, where there is an exponential rise in the diversity and number of both products and customers. The biggest problem faced by store owners is to optimize the experience of inventory management along with increased sales and reduced operational costs. With such enormous product lines it becomes extremely difficult for store owners to track and monitor the performance of a product in terms of its sales, shelf life, cost and customer response. IoT acts as a solution to this problem as it facilitates the use of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) in order to interconnect all the various actors in a logistic system. This humongous network of interconnected devices generate massive amounts of data which is difficult to store and process. Cloud computing here plays a role of a facilitator and provides great help in addressing challenges related to storage and processing capabilities. In this paper, we present an Interactive Shopping Model along with an Automated Inventory Intelligent Management System (AIMS) that benefits from the amalgamation of IoT and Cloud and provides real time monitoring, tracking and management of products. We also propose an algorithm that depicts the working of our system. The proposed system along with the algorithm are simulated using the iFogSim simulator. To this end, we illustrate the working of our proposed system along with the simulated results.