The Internet of Things Resource Management Challenge

Caused by the proliferation of the (IoT) and its related application domains such as Building Automation or E-Health, users face a continuously increasing amount of heterogeneous sensors and devices deployed to their environment. As a result, a large variety of protocols, data formats and physical sensing resources needs to be managed in order to gain benefit from the deployed devices. This raises the question how the resources provided by the devices can be efficiently managed and provisioned. Related concepts like on-demand provisioning, elasticity, or resource pooling and sharing are already known from the Cloud Computing domain. This paper presents the Device Cloud approach, which aims at mitigating the IoT resource management issues by applying Cloud Computing concepts to the IoT domain. Similar to the Pay-as-you-Go paradigm, the Device Cloud allows users to allocate devices from a shared resource pool on-demand. Sensors and devices are not just integrated with the Cloud by being enabled to utilize Cloud services. Instead, the physical (IoT) resources become an integral part of the Cloud resource pool and are shared and provisioned like regular Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Cloud resources.