Investigating operational costs of IoT cloud applications

With the appearance of things of the Internet of Things (IoT) area, IoT Cloud systems have been formed that are supported by cloud technologies, but still needs a significant amount of research. Data users produce with IoT devices are continuously posted to online services, which require the use of cloud providers to efficiently handle, and meaningfully visualize these data. In this paper we analyze the pricing schemes of four corresponding providers, and perform usage cost calculations for a concrete IoT scenario to help users to better understand their operation. We also compare these IoT Cloud providers by estimating service costs for operating an application of a smart city use case. We also validate our cost estimation by simulating the smart city scenario in the IBM Bluemix Platform