Service delivery costan alysis of IoT platforms

Abstract: Internet of things (IoT) which was once a vision is now reality in many sectors. Platform in the IoT ecosystem plays an important role in service provisioning journey by creating business value for the actors and enabling data management for the user. Service provisioning on IoT platform are application centric and is more focused on vertical development. Amalgamation of services, applications in IoT platform is the key in bringing data and society together. Interoperability and scalability is posing as hindrance for this hypothesis. On high level, identifying the cost drivers in these IoT platforms can be key for an actor to bring this hypothesis to reality. This work is one such attempt in providing cost breakdown and identifying cost drivers in IoT platform. A generic framework is proposed which dimensions the platform hardware and software to apprehend the design, development and operation cost of services considered. The framework is designed to proffer three deployment cloud strategies, On-premises, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). Three business use cases are tested on this framework to arrive at the cost structure, which in turn states the cost drivers. The results suggest storage, hardware replacement and software development are major chunk of cost in the structure driven by devices/sensors in the platform and message transmission rate from those devices. Additionally, a suggestion of deployment strategies are made on each use cases to avail cost efficient services.