Cloud Computing and Internet of Things Fusion: Cost Issues Lubna Luxmi Dhirani Department of ECE University of Limerick Ireland lubna.luxmi@ul.ie Dr. Thomas Newe Department of ECE University of Limerick Ireland thomas.newe@ul.ie Prof. Elfed Lewis Department of ECE University of Limerick Ireland elfed.lewis@ul.ie Dr. Shahzad Nizamani Department of Software Eng Mehran University of Engg and Technology, Pakistan Shahzad.nizamani@muet.edu.pk Abstract— The Internet of Things (IoT) has presented many new dimensions to information technology and data communications and has helped to develop the concepts of Smart City, Smart Travel, Smart Surveillance, Smart Health, Smart Energy, Smart Agriculture, etc. IoT offers lots of opportunity to alter conventional monitoring methods through the use of Smart IT, but it has performance limitations in terms of computational resources, limited storage and processing big data. By merging IoT and cloud computing the industry can overcome the low processing power and storage limitations of IoT, since, cloud computing is ubiquitous, comprises high computational and storage capacity ability, has unlimited virtual resources available and is capable of processing big data. However, the cloud is not a free resource and its costs need to be managed. In this paper, we discuss various cost issues which need to be smartly managed for Industries adopting the Cloud with IoT. Keywords—Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, Pricing, Virtual Machines I. INTRODUCTION The vision behind the Internet of Things (IoT) was to create real-time connection and data communication with people or anything, anytime, anywhere using any network. This was to facilitate overcoming the limitations of legacy systems and ways of data communication and processing. As stated in [1], “The IoT infrastructure allows combination of smart objects (i.e. wireless sensors, mobile robots, radio frequency identification systems, etc.), sensor network technologies, and human beings, using different but interoperable communication protocols and realizes a dynamic heterogeneous network that can be deployed in unreachable, or remote spaces (oil platforms, mines, forests, tunnels, pipes, etc.) or in case of emergencies, i.e. earthquake, fire, floods, radiations areas, etc. In this infrastructure, these different entities, or things, discover and explore each other and learn to take advantage of each other’s data by pooling of resources and significantly enhancing the scope and reliability of the resulting services”. Cloud computing on the other hand provides a virtual, scalable, efficient and flexible system for context aware computing and online services. This provides the IoTs with a cost effective solution to deal with data storage, data management and the capability for big data processing [2][3]. This paper focuses on the different cloud instance pricing issues associated with IoT and cloud fusion. A. Cloud Anatomy Cloud Computing offers three different services namely Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) [4]. Services are offered by giant cloud vendors, i.e. Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Globally the cloud attracts a wide range of customers from different business sectors, industries, IT and Government. In order to cater for the different customers the cloud offers different models (i.e. Public, Private, Hybrid and Community) and such services are provided at cost effective prices. The price is affected by various factors, level of convenience of service, availability, scalability, elasticity, storage capacity and security, etc [4][5]. Fig. 1 illustrates the generic cloud structure offering different applications, platforms and services. Fig. 1. Cloud Computing Anatomy B. Cloud Computing and IoT Trending Cloud computing and IoT services have both been growing areas of technology in recent years. As shown in Table I, the amount of investment in cloud services has increased brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by University of Limerick Institutional Repository