AMACoT: a marketplace architecture for trading cloud of things resources

Cloud of Things (CoT) is increasingly viewed as a paradigm that can satisfy the diverse requirements of emerging IoT applications. The potential of CoT is not yet realised due to challenges in sharing and reusing IoT physical resources across multiple applications. Existing approaches provide small-scale and hardware-dependent shared access to IoT resources. This paper considers using market mechanisms to commoditise CoT resources as the approach to enable shared access to CoT resources and to improve their reusability. In order to achieve this, the requirements for trading CoT resources are discussed to conceptualise the proposed approach. A generic description model for CoT resource is introduced to quantify the value of CoT resources. In this paper, a marketplace architecture for trading CoT resources referred to as AMACoT is proposed. By formulating the trading of CoT resources as an optimisation problem, the proposed approach is experimentally validated. The evaluation measures the system performance and verifies the optimisation problem using three evolutionary algorithms. The evaluation of the optimisation algorithms demonstrates the optimality of trading CoT resources solutions in terms of resource cost, resource utilisation, provider lock-in and provider profit.