RegPrice: Region-Based Pricing Scheme for Provisioning Safety-as-a-Service in IoT Applications

In this paper, we propose a region-based pricing scheme, named as RegPrice, for provisioning safety-related decisions dynamically to the end-users. Typically, heterogeneous type of sensor nodes are present in the device layer of Safe-aaS. Considering the case of safety in road transportation, we compute the fixed and variable costs incurred in procurement, deployment, and maintenance for each of these different types of sensor nodes. We introduce the concept of tariff cost, which varies with the type of road in different regions and presence of similar homogeneous sensor nodes deployed in that region. Finally, we estimate the utility of a sensor node, which is a function of the sensing area, ratio of the fixed cost to total cost incurred, responsiveness factor, and rating given by an end-user for that sensor node. The SSPs provide rent to the sensor/vehicle owners for taking their sensor nodes on lease. In order to formulate the interactions among the SSPs and sensor owners, we apply first-price, sealed-bid auction-based game theoretic approach, where SSPs act as bidders. Exhaustive simulation results depict that the proposed pricing scheme, RegPrice, is capable of reducing the expenses of a SSP by 7.51% and 9.71% compared to the existing pricing schemes [1] and [2].